Why we invested in EnforceShield

The fourth announced Fund IV investment Brings AI-Native IP Enforcement to Legaltech

EnforceShield is a Lithuanian legaltech company building an AI-native system for intellectual property enforcement. We led the €1.7M seed round alongside FIRSTPICK to help the team deepen the product and move faster internationally.

For consumer brands, counterfeit listings, unauthorized sellers, cloned storefronts and fake advertisements are a daily tax. They divert revenue, undercut pricing and wear down customer trust.

The problem is getting harder. AI makes abuse easier to scale, but the response has not kept pace. A bad actor can copy a product listing in minutes and spread it across marketplaces, social platforms, ads and standalone websites at close to zero cost.

Finding an infringement is the easy part. The work sits in everything that follows: deciding whether a case is actionable, assembling the evidence, filing through the right process, tracking the outcome and escalating when a takedown is not enough.

That is the workflow EnforceShield is turning into software. Its agents detect potential infringements, evaluate them against a brand's rights and rules, prepare and submit enforcement actions, then monitor what happens next. AI gets interesting when it takes responsibility for a valuable piece of work, not when it produces more information for someone else to process. In brand protection, the customer value is not another dashboard full of problems. It is getting those problems resolved.

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Before our investment, EnforceShield had already won a meaningful group of sophisticated e-commerce brands. These were not companies trialling a nice-to-have. They were trusting a team to act on their intellectual property rights, an operationally sensitive job wired directly to revenue. The next step is to protect them across more of the marketplaces where this abuse takes place.

Once we got to know EnforceShield’s founder and CEO, Rytis Rudzinskas, it became clear where that trust came from. Before founding EnforceShield, he spent years as an IP enforcement attorney running these workflows for clients. He knows which decisions can be standardized, where the exceptions hide and when human judgment still matters. Together with co-founder and CTO Aidis Stukas, he has turned that experience into a product at unusual speed.

The ambition is not to make lawyers marginally faster. It is to build an enforcement agent that protects a brand across every relevant channel and carries each case as far as it needs to go, from repeat-offender management to legal escalation.

"At Vendep, we look for companies using AI to rebuild important business processes, especially where deep domain knowledge becomes software. EnforceShield is a strong example: a difficult legal workflow, early proof from demanding customers, and founders with the experience and appetite to build a category around it."
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- Artis Bisers, Investment Manager at Vendep Capital

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