Sanj Ahilan

Sanj Ahilan is co-founder and Chief Research Officer of Solve Intelligence, an AI patent-drafting platform for patent attorneys. He studied physics at the University of Cambridge and earned a PhD in AI at the Gatsby Unit at University College London.

Working at Huawei and Magic Carpet AI Before Solve

Solve’s author page says Ahilan worked on the R&D team at Huawei and won awards at top AI conferences. It also credits him with contributions to open-source language-model projects on GitHub.

He then joined Magic Carpet AI as employee number four, where, in the page’s words, he “developed AI strategies for trading which deployed millions of capital before being acquired by Blockchain.com.”

Meeting Chris Parsonson at UCL and Founding Solve

Patent Lawyer Magazine reports that Ahilan met Chris Parsonson while both were doing AI PhD research at University College London. TechCrunch wrote in November 2023 that both completed AI PhDs there and ran into the time and cost of getting a patent while working at tech companies such as Huawei and Dyson.

They started the company in June 2023 with Angus Parsonson, who is Chris’s brother and Solve’s CTO, and launched its product the next month. TechCrunch described it as an in-browser document editor that works like Google Docs, with an AI copilot to help attorneys draft patents. Y Combinator lists Solve in its Summer 2023 batch.

Building Software for Patent Workflows and Precise Legal Language

In an April 2025 Patent Lawyer Magazine article about Solve’s growth, Ahilan said: “18 months ago, it wasn’t possible to build software for patent workflows. Now it is.”

He also described the research problem his team works on: “Patent attorneys require precise use of language to ensure they capture the full scope of their client’s inventions. We have built evaluations and algorithms to bridge the gap between the output from off-the-shelf AI models such as ChatGPT and professional-grade legal content.”

A June 2026 Blog Post on Why Patent Practice Needs Purpose-Built AI

On June 3, 2026, Ahilan published “Why Patent Practice Needs Purpose-Built AI: Reflections from Code with Claude” on Solve’s blog. The post reports on Solve’s invited talk at Code with Claude and sums up the lesson in a single line: “The shape of the tool matters as much as the model behind it.” It also describes a second theme of the talk, that “the value of an AI application does not come from the model alone.”