Your SaaS is a stack of intellectual property with a billing system attached. Most of the stack is unregistered, and diligence asks for every layer.
A SaaS company is, in practice, four overlapping IP rights wrapped in a subscription contract. The brand is a trademark. The code is a copyright. The genuinely novel algorithms might be patentable. The open-source dependencies create their own compliance burden. At Series A, investor counsel asks for all four.
Most Indian SaaS startups file only the trademark, sometimes register the copyright, and skip the patent and open-source questions entirely. Each gap surfaces at the worst time — usually mid-diligence.
Three filings cover most of the IP risk on day one. Each is a standalone service and each links to a deeper walkthrough.
Class 9 for downloadable software, mobile apps and recorded software. Class 42 for SaaS, PaaS, cloud computing services, technology consulting. Most SaaS companies file in both — Class 9 covers the product as a thing, Class 42 covers the service as delivered. Filing only one leaves a gap that a competitor or troll can exploit.
Source code is a literary work under Section 2(o) of the Copyright Act, 1957 and is protected automatically on creation. Registration with the Copyright Office is evidentiary — it doesn’t create the right, but it makes the right defensible. A registered copyright with a recorded deposit (usually the first and last 10 pages plus a SHA hash of the full repo) is the gold-standard evidence in any source-code dispute.
At diligence, investor counsel will ask: who wrote what, who owns what, and is the chain of assignments intact. Founder and employee IP assignments are the second half of this story — without them, the company may not own its own code.
Section 3(k) of the Patents Act, 1970 excludes ‘a mathematical or business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms.’ The per se is the operative word. Software linked to a technical effect — a genuine improvement in hardware operation, a measurable speedup, an actual physical process — has been patented in India under the post-Ferid Allani guidelines.
Pure-application SaaS (a better dashboard, a smarter workflow) rarely qualifies. Genuinely novel ML architecture, distributed-systems primitives or hardware-coupled software sometimes does. A patentability search before filing is the cheapest way to find out.
The Ferid Allani matter in the Delhi High Court reopened software patentability in India. A pure algorithm with no technical effect remains unpatentable. A method that shows a technical contribution beyond the program-as-such can be patentable — examination is more rigorous than in the US.
Any SaaS company shipping with MIT-licensed dependencies is fine. Anyone shipping with GPL or AGPL components needs to think carefully about what gets distributed and how. Investor counsel runs license-scanning tools (FOSSA, Black Duck) during diligence; a single AGPL component without proper isolation can stall a round. Open-source compliance reviews catch these before the data room.
Going into diligence in the next 6 months? Get an IP audit done first — it's faster than answering counsel with gaps.
WhatsApp our team →Class 9 covers downloadable software and mobile apps. Class 42 covers SaaS, cloud computing and technology services. Most SaaS companies file in both.
Pure software (an algorithm or app per se) is not patentable under Section 3(k) of the Patents Act, 1970. Software linked to a technical effect — a measurable improvement in hardware or a physical process — can be patentable after the Ferid Allani decision.
Registration is not required to create the right, but it is required to enforce it effectively. Registered copyright shifts the evidentiary burden in court and is the gold-standard proof of ownership and creation date.
The AGPL requires source-code disclosure even when software is used as a network service rather than distributed. A single AGPL component inside a SaaS stack can trigger disclosure obligations. Open-source compliance review during the build phase prevents the issue at diligence.