Before an onion planter machine from a small agricultural innovation firm reached farms across multiple countries, it was just an idea sitting in a workshop in Maharashtra, unprotected, unnoticed, and dangerously close to being copied.
Then Abhijit Bhand got involved.
That machine, developed by SP Agro Innovations, is now patented. The company has since established a near-monopoly in its segment and is exporting to several countries. The patent did not just protect the invention. It built the business around it.
This is what Abhijit does. Not just file patents, but engineer the legal architecture that turns a founder’s breakthrough into a defensible market position. Over nearly a decade of working with startups across sectors like agriculture, food technology, electronics, deep tech, automation etc, he has developed a reputation for one specific outcome: IP that creates real commercial impact, not just legal coverage.
“Most startups think of a patent as a finishing line,” he says. “It is actually a starting gun.”
Abhijit founded Kanadlab Institute of Intellectual Property and Research in Nashik in 2017 after recognising a gap that most people in his position would have simply walked past. India was producing genuinely world-class innovations at the startup level. What it was not producing was the IP strategy to protect and monetise them. Founders were filing too late, drafting too narrowly, or not filing at all, and competitors, both domestic and international, were watching.
His practice was built to change that calculus.
In agriculture alone, the impact has been visible. Beyond the conventional agri-automation inventions, he has worked with a startup developing a portable soil testing device out of Nashik, bringing affordable, on-the-spot soil diagnostics to farmers who previously relied on slow, expensive laboratory analysis. The patent protection around that device is not just a legal shield. It is the foundation for the startup’s fundraising conversations, its licensing potential, and its ability to enter new geographies without fear of replication.
In food technology, the results have been equally striking. A Pune-based startup came to Abhijit with an innovative manufacturing process for black garlic, a product with significant nutraceutical value but a notoriously difficult and proprietary production method. He helped them protect that process. The product, launched under the brand name Garlium, went viral in the market. The patent behind it means that the startup, not its imitators, captures the commercial upside of what they invented.
Across sectors, the pattern holds. An Ahmedabad startup working on an innovative fruit ripening technology found in Abhijit a consultant who understood that their invention sat at the intersection of agricultural logistics and food safety, and that the patent strategy needed to reflect both dimensions. A Bengaluru company developing an advanced Learning Management System came to him with a product in a crowded market and left with IP protection that carved out a clearly defensible technical position. Different sectors, different founders, the same underlying challenge: how do you protect what you have built before the market catches up with you?
The answer, in Abhijit’s practice, always begins before the filing, and it rarely begins alone. Behind every engagement at Kanadlab is a team of over fifteen IP experts, each carrying deep specialisation across distinct techno-legal domains, from mechanical and electronics engineering to biotechnology, software, and chemical sciences. Together, they map the competitive landscape, decode prior art, identify which claims will hold under real-world challenge, and build a patent strategy aligned not with where the business is today, but where it intends to go. Freedom-to-operate studies, invalidity analyses, technology landscaping: the tools are technical, but the thinking behind them is always commercial.
What makes him effective with startups specifically is a combination of factors that are rarely found together. He understands engineering, having trained as a production engineer. He understands policy, having studied IP and development economics at the international level, including as a Scholar of the prestigious World Intellectual Property Organization. And he understands business, having sat across the table from founders at every stage, from pre-revenue prototypes to export-ready products. Having a great, well-qualified, well-experienced support team having international IP exposure is another cherry on the cake.
That combination is visible in the outcomes. More than 1,200 successful IP registrations. More than 1,500 clients served. A track record that spans the full length of India’s startup geography, serving over 200 cities in India.
For startups, the message Abhijit carries is one that the market is beginning to validate in real time: the most important competitive advantage you can build is one that cannot be copied. A well-drafted patent application does not just protect your invention. It defines your market, frames your valuation, and tells every competitor exactly where they cannot go.
Somewhere in a farm today, a machine is working that a competitor tried to replicate and could not. That is what a well-built patent does. That is what Abhijit Bhand builds.