- Fearn has launched as a full-service AI-native patent firm, not just drafting software.
- It charges flat fees, such as 2,500 for a provisional filing, $9,000 for a non-provisional, with a refund if no claims are allowed.
- The company is backed by Kindred Ventures, a16z Speedrun, Designer Fund and Essence VC.
A conventional patent application eats 30 to 40 hours of a lawyer’s time and costs somewhere between $18,000 and $40,000. Fearn thinks that math is broken, and it’s built an entire law firm to prove it.
The San Francisco startup has raised $5.5 million from Kindred Ventures, a16z Speedrun, Designer Fund and Essence VC to launch as what it calls an AI-native patent prosecution firm — not a software tool sold to lawyers, but a firm that employs its own former Big Law patent experts and runs its drafting through a system called FearnOS.
“If AI makes the work faster, the client should feel that in the turnaround time and the bill. That only works if you build the firm around the technology from day one,” said Han Kim, co-founder and chief executive of Fearn.
A firm built around its own software
Kim spent years drafting and prosecuting patents at Morrison & Foerster before leaving a PhD in computational neuroscience at Caltech to start Fearn with Angela Gao, who completed her own Caltech PhD in AI and previously built models at Google Research.
FearnOS treats a patent less like a document and more like a graph, mapping every claim to the figures and technical material behind it, and Fearn says the system can take a founder from explaining an invention to a review-ready draft in as little as 24 minutes, with provisional applications typically filed within three business days.
Every application still goes through a human: a former Big Law patent expert reviews the output before it’s filed.
Pricing is flat — $2,500 for a provisional application, $9,000 for a non-provisional, including USPTO fees — and Fearn says it puts its own fee at risk, refunding the $9,000 if a non-provisional application comes back with no allowed claims. The company reports gross margins above 80%.
Selling a firm rather than a feature
Fearn isn’t the only company betting AI can reshape patent work. Solve Intelligence raised a $40 million Series B in December 2025, taking its total to $55 million, and sells drafting and prosecution software to law firms and in-house teams. Patlytics raised its own $40 million Series B in April 2026, bringing its total to roughly $65 million, covering everything from invention harvesting to litigation support.
Both compete by selling tools to existing legal teams. Fearn’s bet is different: it wants to be the legal team.
Steve Jang, founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures, framed the vision on the business model itself: “Fearn has built the technology, legal expertise and business model together. That allows the firm to improve speed and quality while passing the benefits of that efficiency directly to the customer.”
The bigger question is whether AI-native law firm” survives contact with actual patent examiners at scale, or whether the fixed-fee, guarantee-backed model breaks down once Fearn is handling thousands of filings instead of dozens.
