+6

Years building

+100M

Downloads - shaping botim

Hello

- It's Ashutosh, an engineer who turns curiosity into products people use every day

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Portrait of Ashutosh Agrawal

About Me

The person behind the pull requests.

My story

From robo cars to fintech

It started with taking things apart. In school and college I was the one wiring up robo cars and writing code to make hardware move - the moment a motor spun because of a line I wrote, I was hooked.

In Roorkee I started freelancing to support myself, building Android apps for real clients between classes. That habit of shipping for real people stuck with me through startups in Noida and Gurgaon, and then to Abu Dhabi.

Today I help shape botim, the UAE's biggest app. I still get the same kick from it: making something complicated feel effortless for the person on the other side of the screen.

Abu Dhabi skyline across the waterPhoto: Wadiia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Based in Abu Dhabi, UAE

From India · speaks English & Hindi

Right now

  • 01Shaping call experiences at botim
  • 02Exploring AI for multiple use cases
  • 03Growing Instavault on the side

Off the keyboard

  • Travelling the world
  • Gym & running
  • Badminton
  • Cooking

Favourite reads

Book

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Book

Origin Story

David Christian

Experience

Explore My Engineering Journey

From freelancing in a college hostel in Roorkee to the UAE's biggest app - a few stops, lots of lessons. Tap a row to see more.

Find me on LinkedIn
  • botim family video callbotim super-app home screenbotim international money transfer
    • Making voice and video calls feel instant and reliable for millions of people keeping in touch across borders.
    • Building inside a super-app where a call, a chat and sending money home are all one tap apart.
  • indiagold gold loan transfer flowindiagold partner banks
    • Led the backend team that automated customer journeys end to end - support tickets turned into happy reviews.
    • Replaced a costly vendor with an open-source loan management system we integrated ourselves.
    • Built an internal code-review bot that cut merge-request review time by 60%.
  • indiagold app gold loan homeindiagold app splash screen
    • Led a small mobile team to ship a fast, secure and crash-free app loved on the Play Store.
    • Designed an in-house referral and rewards system that became a big driver of organic growth.
    • Templatised base infrastructure so startups could get to their MVP faster.
    • Built an Android SDK that lets apps change any text and its translations remotely - no release needed.

(Always up for a good problem)

Where fintech meets AI - let's build what's next.

Fraud signals, smarter credit, money that just works. If you're building something in that space, I'd love to hear about it.

Let's talk

Portfolio

Things I've Built

Instavault screenshot
Side project · Web + Chrome extension2025

Instavault

I kept saving posts on Instagram and never finding them again, so I built a fix. Instavault syncs your saves, sorts them with AI and makes them searchable. Launched on Product Hunt.

instavault.co

indiagold screenshot
Fintech · Android app2021 - 2025

indiagold

Gold loans, savings and payments for millions of Indians. I helped build it from early days to a 1M+ install app.

Google Play

Kotlin
1textView.text = RichText().make(
2  TextSpan("Hello, ",
3    TextStyle(bold = true)),
4  TextSpan("tap here",
5    TextStyle(link = URL))
6)
Open source · Android library2019

RichText

Flutter-style rich text for Android - style parts of a single TextView without touching HTML.

GitHub

Kotlin
1Restring.init(this)
2 
3Restring.putStrings(
4  Locale("hi"),
5  mapOf("welcome" to "स्वागत है")
6)
Android SDK · built on open-source Restring2020

ReString

Part of the vernacular SDK I built at Lightstone Labs - swap app strings and translations at runtime, no release needed.

GitHub

More on GitHub

How I work

Things I Believe About Engineering

A few principles I keep coming back to - learned mostly by getting them wrong first.

  1. 01

    Trust is the product

    In fintech every crash is someone's money and someone's trust. I'd rather ship a day later than ship something people can't rely on.

  2. 02

    Automate the boring, protect the creative

    If a team does it twice, a script should do it the third time. I built our code-review bot so humans could review ideas, not indentation.

  3. 03

    Own outcomes, not tickets

    The best work happens next to product and ops, not downstream of them. I want to know why a feature matters before I write it.

  4. 04

    Simple scales

    Clever code is fun for a week. Boring, readable systems are what still work at a million users and 3 a.m.

  5. 05

    Leave people better

    I've mentored juniors since college. A good team ships faster than any one engineer, so growing people is part of the job.

  6. Toolbox

    KotlinJavaPythonAndroid SDKSpring BootApache KafkaKubernetesFirebaseWebRTCPrometheusGrafanaSystem DesignRAGMachine Learning

Notes

Notes & Ideas

AI / MLComing soon

Building Instavault: teaching AI to sort my saved posts

FintechComing soon

What shipping a gold-loan app taught me about trust

Terminal
1$ review-bot --mr 1287
2✓ lint  ✓ tests  ✓ naming
3⚠ 2 suggestions posted
4→ ready for human review
ToolingComing soon

Why I built a bot to review our code

Got a Vision? Let's Bring It to Life!

New idea, hard problem or just want to swap book recommendations - my inbox is open.

Get in touch