Darjeeling Design Co. is a brand consultancy and strategy studio
working with product and enterprise technology companies.
Founded in 2023 by Payal Chakraborty, we work with founders and leadership teams
at the moments where a company can no longer be explained on instinct, and the work of
articulating it has become the work itself. Clients are typically between Series A and Series D,
in categories including enterprise GenAI, deep tech, product tech, B2B SaaS, and defence technology.
We are based in Bangalore and work internationally.
Most of our work sits under confidentiality, as is typical for engagements at the strategic layer. We do not publish case studies of strategy work that is still active in market.
A visual overview of selected work is available on the showcase deck along with
an introduction on how we work.
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Founder & CEO
Payal Chakraborty is a brand strategist and creative director based in Bengaluru, India. She founded Darjeeling Design Co. in 2023 after fourteen years of work across enterprise technology, deep tech, B2B SaaS, most of it spent inside the rooms where the consequential decisions are made.
She built and ran a North America enterprise design practice from Bangalore for five years, scaling it to a multi-million dollars in annual revenue, while leading and delivering work for clients across Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe — a cross-regional working career. Engagements spanning fundraises, repositionings, category entries, and transformation programmes at the C-suite layer of both early-stage startups and billion-dollar enterprises. Before founding DDC, she co-founded Kontiki AI, an NLP SaaS deployed across three geographies and later open-sourced.
She co-authored Social Sustainability in AI with Xeno Co-lab, a definitive industry report on ethical leadership in emerging technology that was featured in Service Design Network's Touchpoint and presented as an invited keynote at Design Matters 2025 in Copenhagen.
Her writing on brand, conviction, and the practice of running a studio appears on Substack, Parallax and occassionally on the DDC blog, Tea Room.
She holds a degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Fergusson College, Pune, is a certified IDEO design thinking practitioner, and completed the Strategy in the Digital Era executive programme at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
DDC is structured around her leadership of every engagement, supported when the work calls for it by a curated network of senior collaborators across service design, product design, visual design, and engineering.
The studio is deliberately small. The work, by design, is not.
Darjeeling Design Co.
VO-437, WeWork Embassy TechVillage, Block L,
Devarabisanahalli, Outer Ring Road, Bellandur,
Bengaluru, Karnataka 560103
