What the role involves
In a world where products and software can be replicated overnight, intellectual property is the last durable moat. Every breakthrough in AI, biotech, clean energy, and autonomous systems depends on patent protection to survive. Yet the system meant to protect these innovations hasn't kept up.
Stilta exists to fix that: we build agentic AI for intellectual property, creating the technology that will finally modernize how the world’s most important ideas are defended. We just closed one of the largest seed rounds in Y Combinator, backed by top Silicon Valley investors. We already work with several of the world’s largest IP firms and Global Fortune 500 companies, and are growing rapidly.
About the role
We're hiring a Founder's Associate to operate alongside the founding team. The job is whatever moves the company forward that week - one week it's an investor update, the next it's diligence on a competitor, the next it's running point on a Fortune 500 demo. No two weeks will look the same. If you want a front-row seat to how a generational company is built from scratch, this is it.
What you’ll do
Prepare and run competitive intelligence that directly shapes product and sales strategy
Build investor materials, board updates, and strategic analyses that inform how we raise and grow
Support sales by prepping for enterprise demos, building custom materials, and following up with prospects at the world's top IP firms
Source, screen, and coordinate candidates as we scale the team from five to fifteen
Build internal systems and processes from scratch - the operational infrastructure of the company doesn't exist yet, and you'll create it
What we’re looking for
AI is your default way of working - you use Claude or similar tools daily to think faster, build faster, and solve problems that used to take days in hours
You thrive in ambiguity and like to operate across multiple workstreams
You're exceptionally sharp
Your slope matters more to us than your starting point - we care about how fast you'll grow, not where you start
Founder or previous startup experience is a plus, but not a requirement.
About Stilta
Stilta builds agentic AI software for intellectual property, starting with patent litigation. Whether challenging or enforcing a patent, leading IP law firms and in-house IP teams use Stilta for source-backed, auditable analysis. Innovation drives the world's most important breakthroughs, but the tools that protect it haven't kept pace. Patent attorneys do high-stakes work with a process still built on manual document review and disconnected point solutions. Generative AI helps with drafting, but it doesn't deliver the trust and transparency that legal-grade work demands - no sources, no traceability, no audit trail. Stilta takes a different approach. We use agentic AI to run search and analysis at a scale manual methods can't match, with every output source-backed, referenced, and auditable. Until recently, this wasn't technically possible. We're four engineers from McKinsey/QuantumBlack who built and deployed AI systems at some of the world's largest organizations. With Stilta, we're equipping the people who protect the world's most valuable ideas with tools that match the stakes.
Full Stilta profile