Your Company Name Is Registered. Your Brand Isn't.

There is a conversation we have often enough that we can predict how it ends.

A founder calls. They incorporated eighteen months ago. The name cleared with the Registrar of Companies, the certificate is framed, the domain is theirs, the app is live. Last week a legal notice arrived from a company they had never heard of, in a city they have never operated in, claiming the name as a registered trademark and asking them to stop using it.

The founder's first question is always the same: how is that possible? We're registered.

They are. Just not for the thing they thought.

Two registers, two different jobs

Company incorporation and trademark registration are separate systems administered by separate authorities under separate statutes, and they answer separate questions.

The Registrar of Companies, under the Companies Act, 2013, confirms that no other company is on the register under a confusingly similar name. That is a corporate identity check. It tells you what you may call your legal entity.

The Trade Marks Registry, under the Trade Marks Act, 1999, decides who has the exclusive right to use a mark in commerce, for specified goods and services, across India. That is a brand ownership question, and it is the one that determines whether you can keep the name on your packaging, your invoices, your app store listing, and your ads.

Clearing the first says almost nothing about the second. A name approved by the ROC can be — and regularly is — someone else's registered trademark. And the trademark owner wins, because their right is the one that governs use in the market.

The date is the asset

Trademark law in India rewards the applicant who moves first, not the founder who worked hardest.

When Form TM-A is filed and the statutory fee paid, the Registry records a filing date. That date becomes the anchor for every dispute that follows. Section 34 of the Act does preserve rights for a genuine prior user against a later registrant — but asserting prior use means producing dated invoices, advertisements, and sales records, then arguing about them in front of a tribunal for two years. Owning the earlier filing date means sending one letter.

The practical translation: file the day the name is finalised. Not after the seed round, not after the rebrand consultant delivers, not once revenue justifies the spend. Every day between choosing a name and filing it is a day the name is legally unclaimed and available to anyone who reaches the Registry before you.

Classes are where the money is lost

A trademark is never registered "for a business." It is registered for specified goods and services, sorted into the 45 classes of the Nice Classification — classes 1 to 34 for goods, 35 to 45 for services. Each class carries its own fee, and there is no bundling discount.

This is where founders lose the most money, and it is almost always the same error: filing in the class that describes the product and forgetting the class that describes the business.

A skincare brand files in Class 3 for the formulations, then opens retail and discovers that retail services sit in Class 35. A software company files in Class 9 for downloadable software, then learns that the cloud platform it actually sells — software delivered as a service — belongs in Class 42. A restaurant group files the logo for its packaged sauces and leaves the restaurant services in Class 43 unprotected.

The cost of getting this wrong is not just the second filing fee. It is the amendment process, the professional fees, and — the part that actually hurts — a fresh filing date on the class you cared about most, months later than it needed to be.

One more classification note worth flagging: the 13th edition of the Nice Classification took effect on 1 January 2026, and it moved certain goods between classes. Specifications drafted against an older edition can draw an objection on filing. Check the current edition before the application goes in, not after.

What the government fee actually is

The statutory fee is public, fixed under the Trade Marks Rules, 2017, and smaller than most founders expect:

• ₹4,500 per class, per mark (e-filing) for individuals, sole proprietors filing in their own name, DPIIT-recognised startups, and Udyam-registered MSMEs
• ₹9,000 per class, per mark (e-filing) for companies, LLPs, and everyone else

Paper filing at the Registry costs more. There is no reason to do it.

The concession depends on who files, not on how small the business feels. A private limited company with no Udyam registration and no DPIIT recognition pays the full rate, even where the founder personally would have qualified. So decide the applicant before you file — and if you file personally with the intention of moving the mark to the company later, understand that this is an assignment, with its own paperwork and its own timing.

Two other things founders routinely under-budget: a word mark and a logo are separate applications, each with its own form and fee; and a registration lasts ten years from the filing date, renewable indefinitely. Spread across that term, the statutory fee is the cheapest asset protection on your cap table.

The search you should run before you fall in love with a name

Before the brand book, before the domain purchase, before the launch date:

1. Search the Trade Marks Registry at ipindiaonline.gov.in for identical and phonetically similar marks — in your class and in adjacent ones. Phonetic similarity matters more than spelling; the Registry and the courts both look at how a mark sounds to an ordinary consumer with imperfect recollection.
2. Check absolute grounds. Section 9 blocks marks that are purely descriptive of the goods, generic, or laudatory. "FreshMilk" for dairy is not a brand; it is a description, and the Registry will say so.
3. Check relative grounds. Section 11 blocks marks likely to confuse consumers given an existing registration or a pending application. Pending applications are the ones founders miss — they do not appear as registered marks, but they hold an earlier date.
4. Then decide. A name that fails this search is a name you have not yet spent money on. That is the best possible time to find out.

Where this ends up

The founders who call us after the legal notice arrives generally have three options, and none of them are good: rebrand, negotiate a coexistence or assignment on the other side's terms, or litigate a prior-use claim that will outlast their current runway.

The founders who call us before launch pay a five-figure sum, once, and never think about it again.

The gap between those two conversations is usually about four thousand five hundred rupees and one afternoon.