Profile / Operator / Volume XII
Sandeep
Agarwal.
He spent ten years buying patents at one of the industry's loudest licensing shops. Now he runs the software trying to make that work obsolete - and he is not subtle about it.
He spent ten years buying patents at one of the industry's loudest licensing shops. Now he runs the software trying to make that work obsolete - and he is not subtle about it.
Sandeep Agarwal is the CEO of XLSCOUT, an AI platform for patent drafting, searching, portfolio analysis, and claim charting. The unusual part is not the title. It is the resume. The patent industry runs on lawyers. Agarwal is not one. He has an MBA in International Management from the University of Dallas, vintage 2000, and a career built almost entirely inside the rooms where patents change hands rather than where they are written.
For roughly a decade he was Vice President at Tessera, then Xperi, then Adeia - the lineage of companies behind some of the most studied patent licensing fights in modern semiconductors. His title was acquisitions, portfolio development, licensing support. The work was less glamorous than the lawsuits suggest: read every patent in a portfolio, decide which are real, decide which are worth buying, decide what they are worth, and close. Twice in his career, IAM Magazine put him on its global Top 300 list of IP strategists - first in 2023, again in 2025. The award is not given for theory.
In 2023 he stepped sideways. XLSCOUT, founded by Jitin Talwar and headquartered in Toronto with a US presence in Wilmington, named him CEO. The company sells software, not patents. Its product line reads like a glossary of the next ten years of IP work: Novelty Checker LLM, Drafting LLM, ClaimChart LLM, Ideacue, ParaEmbed - the last of which the company released as a proprietary embedding model on Hugging Face under the 2.0 banner, tuned specifically for patent and IP language. Agarwal's job is to take the muscle memory of someone who has done these tasks by hand for twenty years and translate it into a software roadmap that customers will actually pay for.
That translation is the hard part of his work, and the part that almost no one else in the industry can do. The patent world has a long tradition of tools sold to lawyers by engineers who do not understand the lawyers, and tools sold to engineers by lawyers who do not understand the engineers. Agarwal is neither. He is the buyer. He has sat across the table from sellers, and he has watched dealmaking break down because someone could not produce a credible claim chart in a week. ClaimChart LLM exists because that week is now an afternoon.
His public voice is restrained. The most-quoted line from him in XLSCOUT's own materials, when he took the job, was, "I am excited to lead this most innovative team." Not a rallying cry. He saves the energy for industry rooms. He has been a named speaker at the LES USA-Canada annual meetings in New Orleans in 2024 and Boston in 2025 - the licensing executives' marquee event - where the audience is the same people who used to negotiate with him.
The bigger bet behind the product line is contrarian for the industry he comes from. Patent search has historically been priced and sold as a billable hour. XLSCOUT is selling a SaaS that promises to give you a first-pass invalidity opinion in a sitting, a draft application in another, and a portfolio map of where your competitors are quietly filing. If it works at scale, the people who built careers on bespoke patent search consulting see their margins move. Agarwal knows this. He used to be a customer of those services.
Wilmington is the corporate registration. San Jose is where the CEO lives. Toronto is where the engineering sits. The pattern - dispersed, founder-plus-CEO, AI-on-top-of-domain-expertise - is the small-cap blueprint of the moment. What makes XLSCOUT distinct in the AI gold rush is that the underlying domain is one of the few areas of professional services where the data is public, the language is structured, and the buyers are sophisticated enough to know whether the model is bluffing.
Agarwal is the rare CEO who shows up at industry galas with two business cards: one for the platform he sells, and one with two decades of receipts proving he knows what to do with it. The patent industry tends to dismiss outsiders. He is not one. That is the joke at the heart of his pitch.
I am excited to lead this most innovative team. - Sandeep Agarwal, on being named CEO of XLSCOUT
Tell it your invention. It searches global prior art and tells you, in minutes, whether you are reinventing 1997.
A draft patent application generated from disclosure notes. The lawyer still edits. The blank page stops being the bottleneck.
Map a claim against a target product or prior art. The chore that used to eat a week of associate time, automated.
An ideation surface that mines a portfolio for white space - the gaps competitors have left.
A proprietary embedding model, published with Hugging Face, tuned for the strange grammar of patents.
The tasks that pay $400/hour to consultants. Compressed to software. Sold by SaaS subscription.
"He sat on the Tessera side of the table for ten years. The same people now buy software from him."
"His company shipped a patent-tuned embedding model on Hugging Face. Most CEOs in IP cannot pronounce the noun phrase."
"He runs a 58-person company across three cities and shows up at LES every year to talk to his old customers."
The big thesis is simple. Every billable patent task that a senior associate does today - novelty, invalidity, freedom-to-operate, drafting, charting, landscape - has a structured input and a structured output. Structured tasks are what large language models, properly tuned, are built to compress. Agarwal's job is to be the credible voice that tells the IP buyer this is not vapor.
It helps that he was, until recently, that buyer.
XLSCOUT is a heavy patent producer in its own right. The company building AI to mine patents files patents about the AI it uses to mine patents. The recursion is not lost on anyone in the building.