BOSTON — February 22, 2022 — Circle Internet Financial, LLC, a global internet finance firm that provides payments and financial infrastructure to businesses of all sizes, is pleased to announce Nikhil Chandhok is joining as Chief Product Officer. A visionary and experienced technologist in building and launching internet-scale products, Mr.Chandhok will lead Circle’s global product and growth organization, with a focus on bringing digital currencies such as USDC to global, mainstream scale, while making this technology accessible to businesses everywhere.
Mr. Chandhok comes to Circle from Meta, where he led product development for Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, launching the company’s smart glasses and Spark AR Studio, the largest AR creator network.
“Nikhil is a valuable addition to our executive team and will challenge us as we scale Circle into an influential company with a lasting impact on the global economic system,” said Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO of Circle. “Nikhil’s passion and technical expertise designing internet-scale, future-forward products are integral to Circle’s product innovation and fast-tracking the global use of digital currencies.”
Prior to Meta, Mr. Chandhok was the AR Platform Lead at Google, overseeing Google’s AR efforts. Before working on the products that would shape the Metaverse, Nikhil was the Founder and CEO of Bento Labs, a startup that built an AI-enabled Android distribution. He was also an early employee and Product Lead at YouTube, responsible for YouTube Music, growing the product to be the largest revenue and traffic driver, and launching the YouTube app on the first-ever iPhone in 2007. Prior to YouTube, Nikhil was an early Google employee and spent three years at Microsoft developing the first versions of the Enterprise Data Storage and Compute Virtualization products.
“Stablecoins are one of the most innovative use cases for crypto as they promote financial inclusion, reduce transaction costs and contribute to economic growth around the world,” said Nikhil Chandhok, Chief Product Officer at Circle. “Circle is building stablecoin infrastructure for Web3, and I am looking forward to leveraging my experience in building other major internet platforms like AR, video, mobile and search to support their growth.”
Mr. Chandhok graduated from Pune University and earned his Master of Science in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University.