Viraj Verma · Director of Design, AppsForBharat (Sri Mandir) · Bengaluru
12+ years turning messy, multi-app Indian realities into products used by tens of millions — at Microsoft, PharmEasy, BlackBuck, and now Sri Mandir, where design helped scale revenue 12× in 18 months. Ex-founder. AI-first, always.
But just a little back…
Every chapter is the same obsession: take a deeply Indian, deeply offline behaviour — and design the product that brings it online without losing its soul.
Leading design at AppsForBharat (Sri Mandir) — helping create the faith-tech category, scaling revenue from 2Cr to 24Cr+ MRR while running 12+ GTM experiments and conceptualising Sri Panchangam (50K installs in 3 months, 35% D1 retention).
Founded ThekaBook — Slack for India's 15M construction professionals. Bootstrapped 0 → 10,000 users and $10K MRR, selected for Microsoft for Startups (SaaS + AI), made 3 hard pivots and learned more than any job could teach.
Design Manager at PharmEasy (Docon) — scaled a team of 13 and shipped India's first online prescription software for 10,000+ doctors, cutting Rx time from 10 min to 1.5 min and ratings from 3.5★ to 4.9★.
UX Designer 2 at Microsoft on the Viva Insights AI team — inclusive, AI-enabled wellbeing experiences for 30M+ users in 120+ countries, featured by Satya Nadella at Build 2020.
UX Lead at BlackBuck (IPO-bound) — delivered the BOSS app that moved 10,000+ truck owners from paper to phone, India's first online freight marketplace.
First UX designer at ZestMoney — redesigned India's first 100% cardless EMI checkout for first-time borrowers, lifting conversion from 8% to 13%.
B.Arch, IIT Roorkee — where systems thinking met craft. I still design products the way architects design buildings: structure first, delight always.
Featured · AppsForBharat
Faith is India's oldest daily habit. My team's job: design a category that didn't exist — digital puja, chadhawa, astrology & sacred commerce — with the reverence it deserves and the rigour a business demands.
hover or tap the diyas — light all five ✨
User-backward, revenue-first roadmap — built from immersions with 50+ devotees across India, then translated into product strategy with founders and CXOs.
One design system, seven apps — a unified component architecture that cut duplication drastically and made design-to-engineering handoff a non-event.
Team of 12 across 7 verticals — Puja, Chadhawa, Commerce, Astrology and beyond, with quality, velocity and mentorship as the operating system.
Sri Panchangam, 0 → 1 — conceptualised and own growth for "the Sri Mandir of South India": GTM, experimentation and monetisation.
AI Product Ninja · Independent builds
Product-grade MVPs built end-to-end with AI-first workflows — to validate ideas before a single engineering sprint is spent. Three of my own, many more inside companies.
AI meal-planning for Indian households — 21 meals a week, planned around what's actually in an Indian kitchen. Built to test whether AI can earn a place at the family dining table.
Visit project ↗
AI-generated photo-frame gifting — turning family photos into illustrated keepsakes. A bet on emotion-led AI commerce, validated with real orders.
Visit project ↗
The day's news, retold as comics. An experiment in whether generative visuals can make current affairs snackable for audiences that skip long-form.
WIP · Coming soon
AI Design Leader · Inside the org
At AppsForBharat I build internal AI tooling that compounds — every hour invested returns hundreds across design, marketing and analytics.
An AI planner that drafts, themes and schedules devotional content calendars — turning a week of marketing effort into an afternoon of curation.
A generative pipeline for campaign and festival creatives — on-brand assets at the pace of India's festival calendar, without burning out the design team.
Natural-language product analytics: anyone on the team asks a question, Claude queries Mixpanel and answers with charts. Data democracy, no SQL required.
Selected work · 2017 — 2024
India's first online prescription software. Led a team of 13 through the redesign that doctors actually adopted — across 35+ specialties.
Conceptualised, built and scaled a full-stack construction-tech app for a 15M-strong workforce. Three pivots, one Microsoft for Startups selection, endless lessons.
Viva Insights AI team — inclusive design for task management, wellbeing and network growth across 120+ countries. Featured by Satya Nadella at Build 2020.
The BOSS app — a major offline-to-online behaviour shift for India's first online freight marketplace, designed for low-literacy, high-trust users.
How I lead
Six things I'm known for — the same six things I'd bring to your team on day one.
12 designers across 7 verticals today; 30+ mentees over the years. I grow generalists into leaders by tying every craft decision to a business goal.
I don't wait for AI mandates — I build the tools, prove the ROI, then scale the workflow across the org. Prototyping, content, analytics: all AI-accelerated.
Ideas get tested as working products in days, not quarters — internal or external — before a rupee of engineering investment is committed.
From truckers to devotees, I've shipped for every India. User immersions in, revenue-first roadmaps out — with GTM and monetisation owned, not observed.
One system powering seven live apps: shared components, governed tokens, and handoffs that engineers stopped complaining about.
Design duplication, manual creative work, analytics bottlenecks — I treat operational cost as a design problem and remove it systematically.
What teams say
Viraj has an exceptional talent for scaling teams while cultivating a culture that strikes the perfect balance between creative freedom and design rigor. Any organization would be fortunate to have his guidance.
The most impactful mentor I've ever had. Viraj simplifies the complexities of design — making it about building a story and giving meaning to every decision.
His attention to detail and ability to manage complex projects under pressure — designing Viva Insights through the pandemic — were truly commendable.
Instrumental in building our product and website. His strategic insights enhanced our offering and contributed to the platform's successful launch.
Next chapter
Open to design leadership roles, AI product collaborations and the occasional mentorship conversation.