Esha Saini
Esha Saini is the co-founder and COO of Click'd, a social app she built alongside Sakshi Deshpande starting in 2024. She holds both a BS and MS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she concentrated in Human-Computer Interaction.1 Before focusing on Click'd full-time, she was a UX Strategy Designer at IBM Client Engineering in Chicago from August 2024 through December 2025, and prior to that a Product Designer at Delta Air Lines' internal Delta Innovation Lab.1 She describes herself publicly as a "founder, designer, artist."1
Early background and high school
Saini grew up in the Herndon, Virginia area and attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) in Fairfax County — one of the most selective magnet schools in the United States and consistently ranked among the top public high schools in the country.54 The school requires students to take a multi-year computer science sequence that includes courses in parallel computing, data structures, web and mobile app development, and computer graphics.5 This was Saini's technical training ground before she enrolled at Georgia Tech.
While at TJHSST she founded SpeakUp Academy, a summer program she ran from 2016 through 2019 that taught classes on politics and public speaking to students in grades 3 through 7.4 The session culminated in a showcase where students delivered speeches on their opinions about current events. She built a website to market the classes and handle registration — her first experience designing a product end-to-end for real users.4 She also worked early engineering internships during high school: an Enterprise Information Management intern at Hilton Corporation analysing customer preference data in Redshift and Netezza, a software intern at Adept Technologies building file retrieval features for a financial web application using Node.js, and an intern analyst at the United States Geological Survey.4
Outside of school, Saini has maintained an art practice in multiple media including watercolor, charcoal, and ink pen — a creative thread she carries through to her product design sensibility.41
Georgia Tech
Saini enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, earning both her BS and MS in Computer Science. Her MS concentration was in Human-Computer Interaction, the subdiscipline of computer science that studies how people interact with software and how to design those interactions for usability and meaning.1 The HCI track at Georgia Tech draws on psychology, design, and engineering, and Saini — who identifies as a designer as much as an engineer — pursued this intersection consistently across her academic and professional work.
During her time at Georgia Tech she served as Marketing Chair for a CS student organisation and held a brief role as Head of Marketing Analysis at Apollo Connect, a campus-connected startup, in 2020.1
Design career
The Home Depot (2022–2023). Saini worked as a UX Designer at The Home Depot for a year from May 2022 to May 2023, covering her transition from undergraduate to graduate studies.1 The Home Depot's digital design team serves one of the largest retail customer bases in the United States, giving her early exposure to consumer UX at scale.
Delta Innovation Lab (Aug–Dec 2023). During her MS year Saini interned as a Product Designer at Delta Air Lines' Delta Innovation Lab — the airline's internal unit for researching and prototyping new digital products.1 The role was in Atlanta, where both Georgia Tech and Delta's headquarters are located, and ran for five months. Internal innovation labs at major airlines typically focus on customer experience improvements across booking, loyalty, in-flight entertainment, and operations — all high-complexity UX problems that involve designing for millions of users with competing constraints.
IBM Client Engineering (Aug 2024–Dec 2025). After completing her MS, Saini joined IBM Client Engineering in Chicago as a UX Strategy Designer.1 IBM Client Engineering is the division that embeds teams directly with enterprise clients to co-create technology solutions; the UX strategy role involves translating complex technical capabilities into usable products for large organisations. She held this role concurrently with building Click'd from May 2024 onwards, before leaving IBM in December 2025 — suggesting she shifted to building Click'd more intensively around that point.1
Click'd
Saini co-founded Click'd with Sakshi Deshpande in May 2024. She carries the COO title and is the product and design lead.1 The app reflects her professional formation: it is, at its core, a designed interaction system — the Tile formats (Daily Prompt, This or That, Photo Prompt, Doodle, Mini Game, Song of the Day) each represent a distinct interaction pattern meant to elicit a different register of sharing between friends.2 The product's visual identity and the social content on Click'd's Instagram account are also consistent with someone who thinks in design and aesthetics: the brand leans into tactile and lo-fi references (a "retro" phone aesthetic, Lorde nostalgia, "quarter life crisis" as a social category) rather than the polished performance culture Click'd explicitly positions against.3
The founders' shared thesis — that "busy, digital-first lives can quietly pull people apart" — directly echoes the experience of two people who went through Georgia Tech together, moved to the same city (Chicago), and tried to maintain friendships through apps that were not designed for closeness.6 Saini's design background at IBM, Delta, and Home Depot gives her a vocabulary for structured interaction at scale; Click'd is the application of that vocabulary to the problem of maintaining personal relationships.