Vilnius-based EnforceShield raises €1.7 million Seed round to fight AI-powered IP abuse with autonomous enforcement

EnforceShield, a Vilnius-based LegalTech startup that shields businesses from intellectual property violations, has raised a €1.7 million Seed round for its attorney-built, autonomous intellectual property (IP) enforcement platform.

The round was led by Vendep Capital, with participation from FIRSTPICK VC, and the capital will be used to expand the platform into more sophisticated workflows and broader IP lifecycle management.

Artis Bisers, Investment Manager at Vendep Capital, said, “AI has made turning service businesses into software into a massive opportunity, and legal services are ripe for this shift. Finding counterfeits was never the hard part for brands. The value lies in everything that happens after discovery, and EnforceShield handles the entire process in a single system rather than stopping at detection.

“Rytis worked on this problem himself for years before building the company, which is precisely the expertise needed to automate it properly. This team has shown it can turn that knowledge into product at genuine speed. We are delighted to be backing them as they extend that automation to every channel where brands are being copied.”

Founded in 2024 by Rytis Rudzinskas, a practising attorney with a background in running digital IP enforcement operations, EnforceShield is an autonomous IP enforcement platform for enterprise IP holders. Its systems continuously detect, analyse, and execute enforcement actions against IP rights violators at a scale human-only teams can no longer handle.

The company claims that it’s the AI-powered answer to AI-powered IP abuse. Rudzinskas mentions that he has seen firsthand that throwing an ever-increasing number of lawyers and analysts at IP enforcement would never solve its scaling problems. With IP abusers increasingly relying on AI, Rudzinskas realised IP enforcement had to respond in kind.

The Lithuanian startup notes that it runs as a SaaS solution for continuous, autonomous IP enforcement, executing the complete workflow from cross-platform detection through legal analysis, validation, takedown execution, monitoring, and escalation, rather than simply identifying potential infringements for a human team to handle.

It further notes that Validation applies jurisdictionally appropriate legal logic to each case before the system executes platform-specific takedowns and monitors for recurring violations. This logic encompasses evaluating factors such as evidence packs, original brand IP portfolio, applicable laws, likelihood of confusion, unauthorised use, platform context, and enforcement success criteria.

EnforceShield opines that attorneys and analysts shouldn’t be tasked with the repetitive operational work of routine infringement cases; therefore, it is designed to execute it autonomously from the outset.

The platform’s AI agents make case-level enforcement decisions using its built-in, jurisdiction-dependent legal and platform-specific decision logic. This enables its “human-at-the-end” model, where analysts and attorneys only approve system outcomes and handle flagged exceptions or complex escalations.

Rudzinskas, CEO and founder of EnforceShield, said, “When I founded this company, I felt we were already operating on borrowed time. Generative AI had made IP abuse a booming business, but enforcement was still largely a human-scale operation. Enterprises didn’t need more lawyers or even a software co-pilot. They needed tech that’s able to think like a lawyer and pilot itself through enforcement workflows.

“We started by reworking the legal operational workflows I’ve spent years building and operating manually and encoded that expertise into a system that can run autonomously. EnforceShield is now freeing human teams from a glut of repetitive work they’ll never manage manually, and developing the most sophisticated software that can perform the operational enforcement function itself and at scale.”

According to the startup, this design decouples enforcement volume from headcount: enterprises can handle dramatically higher case volumes without scaling their legal or brand-protection teams in proportion.

It’s also what makes same-day onboarding possible. EnforceShield asks for minimal upfront data, ingests it directly, and returns results, often surfacing infringements clients didn’t even notice. The company is headquartered in Lithuania with a US subsidiary in Tennessee. It plans to use this capital to grow the overall technical and product capacity needed to automate the next layer of the IP enforcement process. The next phase of development will extend EnforceShield agents beyond standardised takedowns to manage escalation, repeat offenders, and more complex enforcement pathways.

The platform already operates globally, and the funding will also support commercial expansion in the US, which already accounts for up to 80% of EnforceShield’s sales pipeline.