The ₹12,500 Company

We were sitting in an office in Mumbai — Gaurav and I — and the number just sat there on the table between us. Neither of us had that money. Neither of us was close to having that money. The train tickets that brought us there had cost about ₹170 each, and that was already a considered expense.

So we did the arithmetic that broke people do. If a patent costs ₹1,50,000, what happens if we try to file it for ₹1,000? Worst case it fails, we spend the evening at Chowpatty, and we go home. That was the entire plan. That was the whole strategy document.

The idea we wanted to protect was a personal-care product that we still get teased about to this day. But it was ours, we wanted it on record, and nobody would tell us how.

Pooja used to write stories back then, just to pass the time. So we reasoned like idiots and got lucky: if she can write a story, how hard can a patent specification be? She wrote it. We took it to the Mumbai patent office. And there we met a gentleman — a sir, I still think of him only that way — who sat us down and explained the rules properly. What a claim is. What a specification has to contain. What we had got wrong. We changed a few things.

And the patent was filed.

Gaurav and I walked out of there with the same thought running in both our heads. Is it actually this simple? And if it is — if this is all it is — then why does nobody know?

We went back and asked our college professors. They were, at first, very confident. We know everything. Four or five questions later it was clear that they did not, and neither did we, and the only difference between us was that we had at least been to a patent office.

Around that time we were poking at filing data, the way you do when you are looking for a reason to believe something. India's total patent filings had not yet crossed forty thousand a year. Roughly sixty per cent of those filings were being made by applicants from other countries.

We kept comparing, and kept looking for the reason. There was no shortage of people talking about innovation. Innovation was everywhere — competitions, incubators, speeches. But rights? Who was talking about the rights?

That was the question that would not let go of us. You can teach a country to invent, and if you never teach it to own what it invents, you have simply trained it to give things away.

So we started running awareness sessions. And believe it or not, we did not start with engineers or founders or researchers. We started with schoolchildren.

Then the second problem arrived, exactly as it had to. People became aware — and then asked us how to actually file. So we learned to file. And once we could file, it seemed obvious that we should file for others.

That is the point at which this stopped being a hobby.

Naming it took longer than starting it. I genuinely do not remember how many names we discarded. In the end, the answer came from where these answers usually come from.

M for Gaurav's sister. Y for mine. C for Pooja — Chinnu, to the people who love her. Crave was all of ours.

MYCrave.

Now the practical question: where does a company with no experience and no money go looking for its first audience? We picked the answer that was simply nearest. There is a town near Vadodara called Vidyanagar with a very high density of colleges. We went there.

I called two more friends, Nilay Soni and Nirmal Tank, and told them what I believed — good future, come along. Now we were five.

Each of us put in ₹2,500. That is ₹12,500, and it went on a website and on clothes, because we had decided that whatever else was wrong with us, we would not look wrong.

And I should record this properly: my ₹2,500 was given to me by Pooja. I have not returned it yet.

That ₹12,500 remains the only money ever invested in MYCrave.

For a long stretch, the routine did not change. Five of us would meet. We would write a proposal, walk into a college, and sit. Sometimes for hours. We would like to conduct a lecture. People came out, people went in. We went into schools, explained it to children, and their teachers wrote us recommendations to colleges.

Success did not arrive quickly, and money arrived slower. Nilay and Nirmal left fairly early — I do not hold a single day of it against them. Gaurav's final year took him back into his studies.

Which left two.

We needed a way to earn anything at all. Clients were a fantasy; filings existed, but who would give them to us? So we printed a membership form. Become a member — we will help you innovate. Ten rupees.

And after sessions, people would come. A little money here, a little there. In one school the students paid us in coins. Actual coins, counted out. It came to about ₹570 — and we took that money and went to a proper air-conditioned restaurant and ordered a full meal, because our normal diet at the time was Bournvita and a puff.

I want that sentence to stay in, because I do not want anyone reading this later to think it was elegant.

Pooja's joining share in MYCrave was 7%.

She never once gave the company 7%.

When everyone else was leaving, she said it plainly.

And then, because she had understood our finances better than I had: when I go home, just give me the travel fare. I don't need anything else.

It was never about the money. It was that going back was not on the table, for either of us. Something had to work.

Others arrived from outside the company and behaved as though they were inside it. Nikita. Srushti. They just wanted to help — and they helped enormously. Food came from their homes. Rent got covered on a bad month. Documents got made. College dates got arranged. They were the first people who looked at MYCrave and saw a company rather than two people in trouble. You have no idea what that does for you.

Then we left Anand and came back to Vadodara, and we found an office.

I will describe it accurately. The paint on the walls was old, so we stuck coloured paper over it. We put a saree over a tyre and called it a table. I have watched Pooja hold a broom and sweep that office — a thing she had never once done in her own house.

And at home, nothing was flowing back. My mother made papads to sell. When our car was damaged, my father paid for the repair out of farm money and did not tell me. Neither of my parents had an education. Their support did not require one. Pooja's family, in all that time, never asked her a single question about what she was earning — and that mattered as much as anything else in this story.

The office ran. MYCrave ran. Our annual turnover had not crossed ₹4 lakh, and we were sitting in that room making plans for ₹40 lakh.

That is also when we launched India's first IP Bank — at a time when most people we met could not define IPR, we were already talking about what a portfolio is worth. We tried other services too. Everything else fell away. IPR stayed.

The first real break came from Maulik sir: thirty-six trademarks in a single order.

We had never seen that much money at once. Everyone who had started the company with us had already gone. That order was a lifeline, and we used it exactly like one — a little further, then a little further, another filing here, some confidence there.

Then an email came from Rungta. Come and conduct a seminar. It was our first time working outside Gujarat, and the way we were treated there was, at that stage of our lives, difficult to believe. That seminar bought us more confidence than it did revenue.

Remember that email. It comes back at the end of this story.

Some money came in, and with it a Ciaz — and in that car MYCrave finally picked up speed. Kolhapur, by road. Jaysingpur, after a call from Sawant sir. Kerala. Sikkim.

We slept at petrol pumps. We got ready for seminars inside the car. We took broken interior roads to avoid toll charges. We washed our faces with a bottle cap of water, walked into a college, and delivered the session smiling.

And here is the detail that still makes me laugh at myself. With a maximum bank balance of about ₹50,000, we were writing our success stories in advance. Preparing for interviews. Agar aisa ho gaya toh kya karenge?

Pooja and I fought almost daily. It was a two-person company and we saw everything in it. Those memories are bigger than any turnover sheet I have signed since.

In the middle of all that, an international engineering company decided to trust us. They gave us NDA reviews. We registered their trademarks in the USA, at a point when we had no fixed plan for India. We built a 300-page report covering 100 patents for a litigation matter, with no experience whatsoever. We worked through a multinational's litigation issue the same way — by simply doing it.

I would not recommend the method. But it changed what we believed we were allowed to attempt.

Somewhere in those years, the same conversation kept repeating in colleges.

Sir, we want to file a patent. We don't have an idea.

And one day, instead of treating that as the end of the conversation, we treated it as the start of one. What if we supply the idea, and we file it?

That single reframing has since spread across the entire IPR industry in India. Research-to-patent. It started in a car, between two tired people, as a practical answer to a problem nobody else was bothering to solve.

At PVPIT alone we filed more than eighty patents. Nandkishor sir came into our lives there, and through him, Kishor sir — who first joined a different company, then joined us as an employee, and is today a partner.

We have started companies in this journey and shut them down. People have arrived and left. One constant survived all of it: the belief that innovation should belong to the person who had it.

Then Corona came, things changed, and we came out of it harder and better staffed.

Somewhere along the way, the scale stopped being personal. And none of it is my achievement, which I want to be exact about.

Priyanka joined without knowing what a patent was and now runs a branch. Srushti started by helping with trademark forms from a distance and now handles patent drafting and a branch of her own. Kishor sir went associate, employee, partner.

Behind them is the team most people never see — Megha, whose tracking is the only reason any of this can be monitored at all; Prabjyot, available at midnight if the work needs it; Sweety, who barely spoke when she joined and now speaks more than anybody; Ashish, who took hold of design work at the exact moment it was about to overwhelm us; Saurabh, whose inputs closed a difficult chapter cleanly.

Sometimes I look at that back-office team and see our own beginning in them.

The other thing that changed is unglamorous and important: we wrote things down. A manual. A system. Monitoring. When a problem arrived, it stopped being mine and became the team's.

On 22 February 2025, with the Rungta Education Foundation in Bhilai, Chhattisgarh, we filed 207 utility patent applications in a single twelve-hour window — recognised by the Golden Book of World Records as the most utility patent applications filed in twelve hours. Behind it sat a year of work: more than 5,000 students and 250 faculty members trained, 70+ seminars and webinars, 125+ mentoring sessions, and 6,680 pages of documentation.

I want you to notice something about that sentence.

Rungta is the college that emailed us for our very first seminar outside Gujarat, when we were two people with a saree over a tyre for a table and no reason on earth for anyone to take us seriously.

They took us seriously.

Eleven years later, we set a world record together.

I have thought about that a great deal, and the lesson I take from it is not about patents. It is that the people who back you before you have anything are the ones you should still be building with when you finally do.

The plan from here is not modest, and it is not meant to be.

A live-commerce platform for IPR services — the first of its kind in India — so that anyone needing help is one video link away. Video-based problem solving for existing clients. I.N.V.E.N.T. Club, an IP Cell built for schools, aimed at two lakh teenagers. IP BANK India relaunched at a far bigger scale. EMI options, because cost should not be the reason an invention stays unprotected. Free patents for students, and free copyrights for people who cannot afford them. Non-technical campuses: medical, pharmacy, nursing, commerce, arts. International filing routes with a clear roadmap instead of case-by-case guesswork. Freedom-to-operate work for industry. ISO certification. Books — at least five of them.

Beyond all of it sits the ambition I actually care about. We want to show this country that intellectual property can be borrowed against — that IP can serve as collateral, that a company can be run on the strength of what it has created. Indian innovation should stay in India and pay for itself here.

There will be distractions. There always are. The discipline is remembering why we started.

I will finish where the ₹12,500 began.

If somebody asked you to write ten points about yourself, you would not write down how much money you made. You would write what you changed. That is the only scoreboard that has ever meant anything to me, and my promise to everyone inside this company is that MYCrave will give you enough material to fill that page.

MYCrave began as a small number of people's dream, and it is not going to end that way. The letters in the name came from three sisters. The company they named is going to belong to the people running it.

That was always the point.

Your creation · Our execution.

— Dhruv Brahmbhatt, Founder