Hi, I'm Deepika Rao.
I build AI systems that run real things.
I take products from zero to one: as a founding designer, a product lead, and now a co-founder. I design with taste, ship my own code, and read the P&L myself. The proof is below, all of it live.
Potential
Co-running a D2C coffee brand whose day-to-day is operated by nine agents I built. Orders grew 8x month-over-month in the first spring.
full case study →
Thena.ai, founding designer → product
Two years at an AI-native support platform backed by Lightspeed and First Round (Vanta, Braze, Vercel as customers): a UI overhaul that 20x'd usage, AI features at near-100% adoption, production React.
full case study →The Content Engine
The agent pipeline behind @deepika.builds: research to script to post to numbers. From practically zero to 9,300+ followers and 1.1M views.
full case study →LifeOS
A voice-first health OS on my phone, in use every day and now open source. Realtime voice on two providers, 284 tests.
full case study →Other things I've built
The path here
- 2026 – PresentBuilding & operating my own products · Potential · @deepika.builds · LifeOS
A chapter I chose on purpose: co-founded Potential and built the nine agents that run its ads, content, store, and ops day-to-day; grew @deepika.builds from zero with a content pipeline; open-sourced LifeOS. One product person running a company's whole digital surface, all of it live and public.
- 2023 – 2026Founding designer → product · Thena.ai
Joined as founding designer at an AI-native support platform backed by Lightspeed and First Round (Vanta, Braze, ClickHouse, Incident.io as customers) and grew into product: agent workflows, copilot, and sentiment features at near-100% adoption. Led the overhaul that 20x'd usage and owned the funnel from onboarding to paid.
- 2021 – 2023Senior product designer → product manager · Scaler (InterviewBit)
Designed Scaler Forever and its US launch, then moved into product management: led two zero-to-one products for placements and recruiting, and built the sales dashboard that added $1M in revenue for a 600-person team.
- 2020 – 2021Product designer · Spottabl
Early team on a B2B recruitment platform that grew to 100+ clients and 3,000+ recruiters. Zero to one from the first sketch: shaping requirements with the CPO and CTO while designing the whole platform.
- 2017 – 2020Chartered accountant · Ninjacart · MRNM & Co · Mahajan & Aibara
Risk advisory for MNCs, audits, and finance for Ninjacart's grocery vertical. Where the comfort with P&Ls, unit economics, and being the person who actually reads the numbers comes from.