A California startup is pairing patent law experts with an in-house artificial intelligence and engineering team to expedite the process while also reducing costs significantly.

Fearn is looking to accelerate patent prosecution, which is the legal and administrative process of drafting, filing, and negotiating a patent application.

Fearn said it can prosecute patents across software, hardware, robotics, semiconductors, defense, biotech and pharma, with fixed fees, getting provisional filings in as little as three business days, with a guarantee that puts its drafting fee at risk if a non-provisional application receives no allowed claims.

The company has raised $5.5 million from Kindred Ventures, a16z Speedrun, Designer Fund and Essence VC.

Fearn said a conventional patent application can take 30 to 40 hours of attorney time, costing $18,000 to $40,000 in legal fees, while startups might have to wait months to protect technology that can change by the day.

The end goal is simple: Give a three-person startup the patent infrastructure of a much larger company, so the strength of its intellectual depends more on what it invented than what it can afford to spend protecting it.

Fearn was founded by Caltech alumni Han Kim and Angela Gao after they saw the same problem from opposite sides. Kim had prosecuted patents at Morrison & Foerster, while Gao earned a PhD in computer science and AI. They initially built software for law firms, but quickly realized better tooling alone would not fix a model where time saved meant revenue lost and sensitive pre-filing intellectual property made AI difficult to deploy safely.

So, they built the firm around the technology instead. Today, Fearn has hundreds of users, from venture-backed startups to public companies.

“We started Fearn because the technology and the economics of patent law are now inseparable,” said Kim, who is co-founder and CEO of Fearn. “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.

“Our goal is to give startups the quality of a top patent practice with a speed, price and level of visibility that the traditional model was never designed to offer,” Kim continued in a news release.

At the center of the firm is FearnOS, its proprietary drafting and client management system.

Instead of treating a patent as one long linear document, it represents the patent as a graph: it maps claims to the supporting text, figures and technical material behind them, while preserving attorney edits and a full record of how each section was produced.

That structure lets Fearn combine specialized AI with deterministic checks without taking the patent professional out of the loop. Every application is still reviewed by a former patent law expert.

Fearn says work that typically takes 30 to 40 attorney hours can require as little as 30 minutes of attorney time on FearnOS. Provisionals cost $2,500, non-provisionals $9,000 including USPTO fees, and the firm reports gross margins above 80%.

Clients also manage their portfolio through the platform, with controlled access to individual patents, a complete version history and secure connections to the places where technical documentation already lives.

Fearn’s ambition goes beyond drafting patents faster. It wants to give startups the kind of portfolio strategy once reserved for companies with large in-house IP teams and seven-figure budgets for outside counsel.

The company is extending FearnOS across patent families, international filings, office actions and long-term portfolio strategy, so founders can see what protects each product, where coverage is weak and what should be filed next.

“AI is beginning to change the underlying economics of professional services, and patent law is an especially compelling place for that shift,” said Steve Jang, founder and managing partners at Kindred Ventures. “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.”