Kishore Kumar

Joined the founding team in Singapore on Day 1. Helped build the design and product functions from the ground up — process, culture, team, systems. Direct partner to the cofounders and CEO on product vision and roadmap. Contributed to multiple rounds of funding through product narrative and vision.

Building Arta Wealth Platform
Core contributor to scaling from $0 to hundreds of millions in AUM. Authored the growth strategy — including a rewards and referrals program that improved acquisition rate by 2x and referral conversion by 1.6x, with a significant increase in average AUM per user. Designed Arta Long — a community experience for private investors to share investment insights while suppressing account-specific details, building credibility without compromising financial privacy. Functional ownership spans the full product: onboarding (SEC/MAS compliance), investing, growth, account security, community, and brand.

Building Arta Sidekick
Leveraged AI tools to envision and build frameworks for retail clients and investment advisors — enabling passive portfolio monitoring with proactive, actionable updates surfaced in the background.

Driving B2B Partnerships
Established multiple eight-figure B2B partnerships.

Visual editor for generating production-ready React component libraries. Built this to bypass CSS-in-JS performance bottlenecks by leveraging native CSS Custom Properties, injecting state changes directly at the document root. This keeps the live editor blazingly fast by avoiding React reconciliation loops entirely, while leaving the exported library components completely decoupled from editor state. It spits out fully functional, LLM-friendly ZIP packages—so neither you nor the chatbots have to manually write UI boilerplate or fight bundler configurations ever again.

First-of-its-kind Indian classical music notation app with playback, taal structures, articulations, and community sharing. Firebase auth, database, admin dashboard, automated email campaigns (React.email). Sentry → GitHub → Claude error resolution pipeline.

Being used by the r/IndianClassicalMusic and r/Sitar communities. Regularly iterating on feedback received.

Free, ad-free tuner for Indian classical instruments. iOS (Swift), Android coming (C++). Adjustable key, octave-specific tuning. YIN pitch detection via vDSP/Accelerate, sub-50ms latency.

Built as a poet-on-contract for my wife — generating daily scheduled romantic poems — Prints Charming is a hardware-integrated Python daemon that generates and physically prints contextualized poetry. The REST API dynamically injects local interpersonal metadata—like inside jokes and recent events—into an LLM, streaming the synthesized text directly to a serial thermal receipt printer as a tangible analog artifact.

Led design for Google Pay for Business — a merchant app serving small offline businesses across India accepting digital payments via UPI, with over 10 million merchants on the platform. blog

Partnered with the Director of Product and Director of Engineering to reframe the product's direction from payment acceptance to merchant lifecycle — expanding scope into bookkeeping, inventory, credit, and online presence. This shift was reflected in shipped product, not just strategy.

Led cross-functional alignment with Search, Maps, Shopping, and Ads to establish a unified approach to merchant identity — using GPay's KYC-verified merchant data to improve consistency in how businesses appear across Google surfaces and strengthen downstream monetization. This resulted in small offline merchants gaining access to Google Ads and Google Shopping for the first time; additional workstreams were in progress at transition.

Managed a design team of 7, including managers, and owned prioritization and resource allocation across the function to support the product's evolving scope.

After launching in 2017, by 2018 Tez had accumulated 55mn+ downloads, 750mn+ transactions, and over $30bn in transaction volume, holding over 50% UPI market share. With this success, Tez graduated as a core Google-branded product and was rebranded to Google Pay. By mid-2019, Google Pay had reached 67mn MAU and a peak of 59% UPI market share, processing over $110bn in annual transaction value.

I led the monetization charter for Google Pay, building retail payment experiences (online and offline).

Designed a sophisticated microapp ecosystem that allowed developers to host their end-to-end product experience within Google Pay. Designed dozens of primitives to ensure a safe, consistent, and delightful user experience across microapps from several sectors (Travel, Lending, Food Delivery, Ride Hailing...). Ran external workshops and developed detailed developer-facing documentation guidelines; headed review teams to oversee high-quality app launches. This set up multi-million dollar revenue for Google Pay India.

Led accessibility efforts across Google Payments, driving payment products to Gold standard accessibility compliance. Ran cross-functional workshops, redesigned the launch review process, and built internal programs to embed accessibility into the release cadence — while maintaining a two-week shipping cycle.

Tez was a mobile payments service by Google built for users in India. As the sole designer leading up to launch, I partnered with 7 product managers and 30+ engineers to design the app from the ground up—defining its foundations, architecture, design language, end-to-end user journeys, and early growth flywheels that made Tez one of the fastest growing Google products of all time.

Co-invented novel user experiences that temporarily establish a handshake between two devices to facilitate payment between them without ever sharing any personal information or leaving any trace of identity after payments — dubbed Audio QR.

Designing Tez meant deliberately breaking Google's established design conventions. The target user was often discovering the internet for the first time — on a sub-$100 Android device, in a language that wasn't English, with no prior mental model of digital payments. Mapping interactions to familiar, real-world behaviours (cash exchange, in-person trust signals, physical proximity) consistently mattered more than adhering to platform norms built for a different user entirely.

As part of the Next Billion Users initiative, shaped design patterns and practices for designing at this scale: drove field immersions, facilitated primary research with first-time internet users across India, and ran design sprints to stress-test assumptions before they became architecture decisions.

Architected a bespoke design system for the Indian audience at launch. Successfully advocated for these patterns to be adopted by central Material Design leadership and scaled across Google's global ecosystem.

Worked with IDEO Mumbai as a consultant to define and design digital experiences that Dr. Reddy's internal workforce used to manage, track, and predict movement of pharmaceutical supply chains globally.

Led design for the Acrobat Reader for Android during its transition from a simple viewer to a document workflow tool. Worked with a global team aligning across platforms, to rethink reading, annotation, signing, and scanning for mobile. Helped bring Adobe's Document Cloud vision to Android.

Redesigned a broadcast and digital weather system for Danish national television network. The goal was to connect it clearly to the master brand while giving weather its own personality. Built around a green globe and flowing isobar lines. Realistic, playful, and slightly dynamic. Constructed a scalable design framework so the system could move easily between TV graphics and web formats.