Patents Probing — SciTech’s Story of Building India’s First Dedicated Patent Analysis Company
As featured in BusinessWorld | Authors: P. Hari & Dileep Prakash
BusinessWorld profiled SciTech Patent Art Services as a pioneering example of knowledge-driven offshoring — one that goes beyond cost savings to deliver something that larger Western firms simply couldn’t do at scale on their own soil.
How It All Began
SciTech was founded in Hyderabad by Srinivas Achanta, a US-based entrepreneur of Indian origin, with a single employee and a contract from a large US multinational that found patent analysis too expensive to carry out in-house. Within a year, the company had earned the right to expand its client base, and it grew quickly from there — reaching 60 employees and approaching $1 million in revenue.
Why Patent Analysis Needs Human Expertise
Patents are among the richest sources of technical knowledge in the world — nearly 80% of the information in a patent never appears anywhere else. But analyzing them is not a task that automation alone can handle. Words in a patent can mean very different things depending on the reader’s domain expertise — an automobile engineer and a chemical engineer will interpret the same language differently. SciTech’s model puts domain specialists — postgraduates and doctorates in science and engineering — at the center of this process, enabling the kind of nuanced analysis that software tools alone cannot deliver.
What SciTech Does for Clients
Whether a company needs a novelty search before filing, wants to map a competitive technology landscape, or is looking to identify white spaces for future R&D investment, SciTech translates complex patent data into actionable intelligence. Patent mapping, for instance, can reveal both crowded areas and unexplored opportunities — giving research teams a significant strategic advantage.
The Team Behind the Vision
Srinivas built the company with strong advisors from the start. His father-in-law, T.S.R. Prasada Rao, former Director of the Indian Institute of Petroleum at Dehradun, serves as Vice-Chairman and supports business development. Vijay Kelkar, former Petroleum Secretary to the Government of India, serves as Chairman of SciTech — lending the company significant institutional credibility.
India’s Unique Advantage
SciTech remains the only company in India devoted exclusively to patent analysis, operating at the intersection of deep technical expertise and cost-effective delivery. As the BusinessWorld feature notes, the company’s core challenge is not outpacing competition — it is demonstrating to global R&D managers what India-based patent intelligence can achieve that they cannot replicate at home.
