Fearn Raises $5.5M in Seed Funding Led by Kindred Ventures

The round also saw participation from a16z speedrun, Designer Fund, and Essence VC.

The company plans to use the funding to enhance its patent-focused AI models and expand product capabilities, including automated figure generation. These improvements will help inventors of all sizes—from individual researchers to large R&D teams—create high-quality patent applications more efficiently and at a standard typically associated with leading law firms.

Fearn is not built on a single general-purpose AI model. Instead, its platform combines many specialized models, including both language models, and custom built systems, designed specifically for patent drafting. This approach helps reduce errors and hallucinations while producing patent applications that meet important legal and technical requirements.

Unlike many AI systems that rely on massive datasets, several of Fearn's models are trained using smaller, carefully reviewed, expert-labeled datasets. This allows the platform to capture the precision and accuracy needed for patent prosecution and generate more reliable patent documents.

Fearn does not rely on external AI APIs. Instead, it hosts all of its AI models internally, helping reduce security, privacy, and intellectual property risks that often concern enterprise legal and IP teams. Customers can choose from customer-hosted, single-tenant, or multi-tenant VPC deployment options. All data is protected with AES-256 encryption, and the platform complies with major security and privacy standards, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and GDPR.

"Patents are how inventors turn ideas into lasting value, but in a first-to-file system, the priority date is everything, and access to fast priority dates has been gated by cost, complexity and institutional connections for far too long," said Han Kim co-founder and CEO of Fearn. "I spent years in Big Law drafting patents the traditional way before building Fearn, and experienced firsthand what the gap looks like. Innovation moves at one speed and protection moves at another, and that mismatch is where inventors lose ground.

Fearn's co-founders combine expertise in patent law and advanced AI research. Han Kim previously worked on patent applications across software, life sciences and engineering at Morrison Foerster. He researched bio inspired neural algorithms while pursuing a PhD at the California Institute of Technology.

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Co-founder and CTO Angela Gao earned her PhD at Caltech under Katie Bouman, where she and Han Kim first met. Her research on AI and generative models has been published in leading conferences and journals, and she previously developed AI technologies at Google Research. She now leads Fearn's technology and product development efforts.

"Our world is accelerating due to speedups in technology and science, due to human ingenuity and AI model advancements. Intellectual property is the record-of-truth for technology, the design, engineering, and science carta for the world's industries, and the law and economics code by which we operate as innovators and capital markets," said Steve Jang, Founder and Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. "To modernize this critical cortex of our innovation economy, Fearn is developing custom IP-specific models for deeptech, biotech, and hardware companies to quicken and accelerate their drafting and enforceability, and also a multi-model agent harness and patent drafting agent that orchestrates at the speed of GPU compute these once-antiquated and slow workflows."

"The massive wave of attention on our ambient robotics thesis and inaugural product, the Lume, meant we needed to move incredibly fast to protect our technology," said Aaron Tan, CEO and Co-Founder of Syncere. "Traditional patent drafting takes months of person-hours — and lots of precious capital — that a pre-seed startup just can't spare. Fearn changed the game for us, turning our engineering explanations into high-quality drafts in minutes and a fraction of the usual cost, allowing us to lock down our IP overnight and ensure it was fully protected."

About Fearn

Founded in 2025 by Han Kim and Angela Gao, Fearn is an AI-powered patent platform based in San Francisco. The company helps inventors quickly turn ideas into filing-ready patent drafts using specialized AI models and automated figure-generation tools. Its platform is designed to reduce errors and produce high-quality patent applications in minutes at a flat cost of $2,000 per patent. Inventors can then work with their preferred patent attorney to complete the filing process. Fearn is already used by engineers and scientists at both startups and public companies.

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