Tan Yan Shao co-founded Cat and Pillar after eight years as a Trademark Examiner at the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS), during which he personally examined close to 10,000 trademark applications.
During his time at IPOS, Yan Shao built the AutoChecker back in 2013 and still in use today, while the main examination platform has changed multiple times during the same period. The AutoChecker is an Excel-based VBA tool that applies tokenization, stopword removal, and suffix-stripping techniques he devised independently — an approach that happens to mirror methods now standard in natural-language processing — to check goods and services descriptions in trademark applications, and remains a core examination tool of the registry today. Yan Shao also designed the search algorithm behind IPOS's similar-mark searches, still in use in Singapore.
Yan Shao's most significant contribution at IPOS was ip2sg, the trademark registry's filing platform. After five years in development, the system had not launched. In January 2014, Yan Shao was assigned to the project directly by IPOS's senior management, and took over verification and redesign work previously distributed across a team of 20 trademark officers. The platform launched in November 2014.
Alongside this, Yan Shao designed the world's first online MM2 form, and was part of the team that developed IPOS GO, the world's first mobile application for trademark searches and filings.
The search algorithm Yan Shao developed for similar-mark searches was recognised with two PS21 ExCEL Awards in 2016, presented at the government level for excellence in public sector innovation. Yan Shao subsequently trained IPOS registry staff on Madrid Protocol procedures, and trained law firms across Singapore on the use of the filing platform.
Yan Shao left IPOS in 2021 to found Cat and Pillar, seeking to contribute to Singapore's intellectual property ecosystem beyond what was possible from within the registry. His intention was for Cat and Pillar to provide quality trademark prosecution advice, strategy, and execution, extending the standard he had applied as an examiner to businesses navigating the process from the outside.
Within the first few months of the firm's operation, Yan Shao encountered several cases that had been misdiagnosed by local and international law firms, and subsequently secured registration for each without further issue. He has also observed, repeatedly, small businesses infringing the trademarks of larger companies without any awareness of doing so, an observation that has reinforced his view that brand protection is relevant to every business, not only those with the resources to prioritise it.
Yan Shao has since overcome numerous refusals issued by IPOS and IP Australia on grounds of distinctiveness or similarity to earlier marks, through arguments developed to identify specific flaws in the examiner's reasoning in each case.
Yan Shao holds a Bachelor of Industrial and Systems Engineering from the National University of Singapore (University Scholars Programme), and is a registered Trademark Attorney in Australia. He also holds a Specialist Certificate in Intangible Asset Management from the IP Academy. He has been individually recognised in the WTR 1000 (2025 and 2026), and named a Trademark Star by IP Stars (2026).
Yan Shao also holds a Master of Divinity. For leisure, he runs, plays the cello, and collects Iron Man figurines.