Deepika Rao — black and white portrait

I build AI systems that run real things.

A D2C brand run day-to-day by a team of agents I built. A content engine that researches, scripts, and scores everything on @deepika.builds. An open-source voice-first health OS I use every morning. All live — receipts below.

01 / potential

Potential

Co-running a D2C coffee brand whose day-to-day is operated by agents I built.

I'm one half of a two-person company. The other half is increasingly a team of nine agents: data agents that pull the numbers nightly, execution agents that ship ad creative and store changes, and a founder report that tells me what matters tomorrow.

Orders grew 8x month-over-month in the first spring, repeat rate 2.5x'd in four months, and the system has survived its own production failures. The case study walks through one.

full case study →
02 / thena

Thena.ai — founding designer

Two years building an AI-native customer support platform. Nov 2023 – Dec 2025.

Thena's redesigned kanban workflow view on a dark backdrop

Founding (and only) designer at Thena.ai, an AI-native customer support platform serving Vanta, Braze, Vercel, Mixpanel, ClickHouse, and Launchdarkly.

Led a complete UI overhaul that 20x'd product usage (600 → 12,000 min/week), shipped onboarding that drove 40% activation and 50% paid conversion, and started writing production React/Next.js to collapse QA cycles from weeks to days.

full case study →
03 / content-engine

The Content Engine

The agent pipeline behind @deepika.builds — research to script to post to numbers.

A hunter agent scans Hacker News and the web every morning and scores topics. A scripting engine drafts word-for-word reels and rewrites them through an adversarial drafter/critic/judge loop until they clear the bar. A design system renders carousels as code.

The same system runs DM automation, pulls Instagram insights daily into a Postgres dashboard, and maintains a formula library of what actually reaches. The account started from practically zero; it's past 8,500 followers now — every number date-stamped.

full case study →
04 / lifeos

LifeOS — with voice

A voice-first health OS on my phone, in use every day — now open source.

Log a meal by speaking, or snap a photo and let vision estimate the macros. Realtime voice runs on two providers behind one abstraction; nutrition, cycle, wellness, skincare, and fitness live in one PWA.

One codebase runs both my self-hosted instance and a multi-tenant hosted mode. 284 tests, open source at github.com/deepika-builds/life-os-oss.

full case study →
timeline

The path here

  1. 2026 — Present
    Building full-time · Potential · @deepika.builds · LifeOS

    Left employment to build my own things: co-running a D2C brand on agents, a content engine, and an open-source health OS.

  2. 2023 — 2026
    Founding team — product, design & growth · Thena.ai

    AI-native customer support platform serving Vanta, Braze, ClickHouse, Incident.io. Zero-to-one across product and design; led the UI overhaul and growth.

  3. 2021 — 2023
    Senior product designer → product manager · Scaler (InterviewBit)

    Designed Scaler Forever and its US launch, then led two zero-to-one products for placements and recruiting.

  4. 2020 — 2021
    Product designer · Spottabl

    Early team on a B2B recruitment platform used by 100+ clients and 3,000+ recruiters.

  5. 2017 — 2020
    Chartered accountant · Ninjacart · MRNM & Co · Mahajan & Aibara

    Risk advisory, audits, and finance for the grocery vertical at Ninjacart. Where the analytical rigor comes from.

about

A bit more

I started as a Chartered Accountant. Then I found design. Then I found AI. The arc isn't linear, but the through-line is: I like making things that move outcomes — and AI is the most leveraged way to do that right now.

For the last two years I was the founding designer at Thena.ai, an AI-native customer support platform serving Vanta, Braze, Vercel, Mixpanel, ClickHouse, and Launchdarkly. Before that, senior product designer at Scaler/InterviewBit; before that, product designer at Spottabl.

Now I co-run Potential — small surface area, high leverage, agent-first — and build things on the side that I'd want to use myself.

I'm looking for AI-first companies where one person can own a real surface end-to-end: design, code, ship, operate. If that sounds like you, get in touch.