Surya Chhabra

Growth & creative for startups.

I figure things out by making them, moving between brand, video and product, picking up whatever tool each one needs. Most of what is on this page started as something nobody asked me to build.

See the work Get in touch

Scroll to split the lightSeven colours, one for each side of what I do.

growthvideoeducationleadingbuiltresearchsport

Each colour below is a section. Keep going.

01

Growth.

Three growth roles, not the same job three times. A Bay Area startup, India's largest health movement, an early-stage craft studio. No two share an audience, and the work followed the audience.

Founding Growth · TwinMind

Jul – Sep 2026

San Francisco Bay Area

TwinMind has raised $9M from Streamline Ventures, Sequoia and Wolfram, and serves 500,000 daily active users.

Led growth across SEO, content, web and brand, making TwinMind easier to find. Ran experiments and launches end to end: website, creative campaigns, product storytelling, video, social distribution and user research.

SEOContentBrandUser Research

Growth · Satvic Movement

Mar – May 2026

Drove e-commerce setup and growth strategy for India's largest community-driven health platform, designing high-conversion Shopify pages in Replo, Shogun and Figma to turn audience scale into revenue.

subscriber base: 8M+subscriber base

ShopifyReploShogunFigma

Business & Growth · Ocher Studio

Jan – May 2026

Worked at the intersection of entrepreneurship and community impact, arguing for revenue-driven models to support artisan livelihoods rather than charity. Grew an early-stage studio through market research, new revenue channels, partnerships and brand storytelling.

Market ResearchPartnershipsBrand Storytelling

02

AI video.

It started as an experiment: one application video, made with tools I had not used before. Now it is how I make the case for a thing, whether that thing is a product, a brand or me.

Made with

Runway

CapCut

Claude

impressions: 310Kimpressions
people reached: 208Kpeople reached
video views: 120Kvideo views
of reach outside my network: 99%of reach outside my network

Still from TwinMind: animated short — TwinMind: animated short
TwinMind needed explaining in a way anyone could follow, a small child included. I took that on as an AI-animated short film. It follows Sam through a day that will change the course of his life, on one condition: he has to listen to what the people around him are saying. He doesn't, so the twin does.

Still from OFF/BEAT: application video — OFF/BEAT: application video
My first experiment with AI video, and basically my portfolio in 55 seconds. OFF/BEAT asked for an application video and got a mini music-video. It is also how I found out how much I like doing this. It reached 208K people, 99% of them outside my network, and held an 18-second average watch time.

Still from Permute: product demo — Permute: product demo
A UIUC alum's startup, and my first B2B SaaS video. It opens in a different style of AI animation, then becomes a product demo built with Claude: the right features, pitched with the right movements.

Still from Soulful Vybes: car perfume — Soulful Vybes: car perfume
My first freelance job: a spot for an Indian brand about to move into a new segment, car perfumes.

03

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

BS Liberal Arts & Sciences

Astronomy + Data Science · Statistics

James ScholarIllinois' honours programme for undergraduates.

Statistics & data science

Basics of Statistical Learning
Statistical Modeling I & II
Statistics and Probability I & II
Modeling & Learning in Data Science
Algorithms & Data Structures for Data Science
Data Science Discovery & Exploration
Statistical Data Management
Ethics & Policy for Data Science

Astronomy

Radio Astronomy
Computing in Astronomy
Introduction to Astrophysics
Planetary Systems
Galaxies and the Universe
Individual Study

04

Leading, and the rooms it happened in.

Antler Founders: Illinois Entrepreneurs

Head of Exploration, Founders · September 2025

Brought Antler to campus. Workshops and a fireside put 100+ students in direct contact with pre-seed VC. Ran it end to end: the programme, the investor office hours, the guest list for the dinner.

See the post ↗︎

Roles

Secretary, Hindu YUVA

UIUC · Sep 2024 – Aug 2026

500+at the Ganesha celebration

Ran the year's internal and external communications, and led events end to end: Ganesha, Hindu New Year and Guru Vandana.

Instructor

LAS 101, UIUC · Aug 2025 – Dec 2025

25students in my section

Taught Design Your First-Year Experience, the one-credit graded course that gets new students through their first semester at Illinois.

Head of Exploration

Founders, Illinois Entrepreneurs · Sep 2024 – Dec 2025

4×growth in participation

Recruited a cross-disciplinary team to launch new projects each semester, and built the Exploring Entrepreneurship series for non-startup majors.

05

Things I've shipped.

First place at a product hackathon, and three things nobody asked me to make. Built, deployed, live. Version one beats a plan every time.

Won a product hackathonCollectivGroup the orders on a street and last-mile delivery stops being the cost that keeps small local stores off the internet. Built in 24 hours with no code at UIUC Product Space, with two teammates I met the day before. Collectiv screenshot

Spec buildLumiereMatches high-school students into research teams. The chat grades what it catches: slurs and contact details blocked, rudeness only nudged. Built for Lumiere Education, unasked.Open ↗︎

Side projectCreator to BusinessDrop in any YouTube creator and it maps their audience, scores the categories that audience actually buys, and surfaces brand concepts grounded in evidence rather than vibes.Open ↗︎

Side projectKarmic ConnectionsA site for a hypnotherapy and past-life-regression practice. The one project here built for somebody else to use with their own clients.Open ↗︎

06

Astronomy.

Gravity predicts how gas should spin around a forming star. Subtract that from what the telescope sees, and whatever refuses to cancel out is the interesting part. I track that residual with Python and statistics, on ALMA radio-interferometry data for IRS3B, a triple protostar system.