Sakshi Deshpande
Sakshi Deshpande is a co-founder of Click'd, a social app for daily friend connection she built alongside Esha Saini starting in 2024. She holds both a BS and MS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction.1 Alongside building Click'd she works as a Software Engineer 2 at Humana in Chicago.1 Her background spans machine learning research in biomedical pathology, cloud data engineering, and graduate-level sustainability education integration into computer science — an unusually broad combination for a startup engineer in the friendship app space.
Early background and high school
Deshpande grew up in Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, and attended Alpharetta High School, graduating in 2020.1 Her high school activities included Student Council (where she served as Class Representative), Policy Debate (where she was Co-Captain), HOSA (Health Occupations Students of America), and FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America).1 The combination of competitive debate and HOSA suggests early interests in both structured argumentation and health sciences — threads that persist in her subsequent research work and in Click'd's design logic, which is essentially structured argumentation between friends.
Georgia Tech undergraduate
Deshpande enrolled at Georgia Tech in June 2020, completing her BS in Computer Science in May 2023 with a dual concentration in Information Internetworks and HCI.1 The dual concentration is notable: Information Internetworks covers distributed systems, networking, and internet architecture, while HCI focuses on human factors, interaction design, and usability — a pairing that gives a strong foundation for building consumer software systems end to end.
During her undergraduate years she worked as a Research Assistant in Georgia Tech's Pathology Dynamics Lab from August 2018 through July 2021.1 The lab's work centred on dynamic meta-analysis — a statistical method that synthesises research findings across studies over time — and machine learning applied to pathology data. Deshpande's role included quality control for a curated research database, work on a machine learning and dynamic meta-analysis project, and research on assessing and predicting the multi-factorial nature of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) using wild-type and ALS mouse models.1 She presented the dynamic meta-analysis project at the SEMDA research conference.1 This is a substantive undergraduate research contribution: ALS modelling requires both biological experimental data and statistical machinery to model complex, multi-gene disease aetiology, and presenting the work externally at a conference is a significant milestone for an undergraduate researcher.
Alongside research, she interned at NCR Corporation in Atlanta in the summer of 2018 as a Human Resources intern, where she analysed company compensation data extracted from Workday using advanced Excel formulas and created a visualisation portfolio of employee compensation.1
She began a Cloud Engineering internship at Humana in May 2022, before completing her undergraduate degree, and worked there through June 2024 — a period spanning her senior undergrad year and her entire MS.1
Cloud engineering at Humana
During her extended cloud engineering period at Humana, Deshpande worked on three distinct projects: developing data pipelines in Azure Databricks, creating Power BI dashboards with live Azure Databricks integration and monitoring, and documenting internal cloud migration processes.1 The Azure Databricks work involves building scalable data processing infrastructure — ingesting, transforming, and serving large datasets at cloud scale. Power BI dashboards with live integration require connecting the visualisation layer to near-real-time data sources, a meaningful increase in complexity beyond static reporting.
In June 2024, she transitioned from intern to full-time Software Engineer 2 at Humana — the same month she co-founded Click'd.1 This cloud infrastructure background gives her a practical grounding in the backend systems that consumer apps at scale eventually require.
Georgia Tech MS and sustainability fellowship
Deshpande began her MS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in August 2023, completing it in May 2024.1 The MS concentrated in HCI, complementing the systems-focused half of her undergraduate dual concentration. During the MS year she took on two significant additional roles simultaneously.
As a Graduate Teaching and Research Assistant, she led an initiative to integrate sustainability-focused modules into three Computer Science capstone courses at Georgia Tech, impacting more than 1,500 students annually.1 She designed and developed assignments and lectures on the social and environmental impact of software engineering. She structured the initiative as a rigorous research study with control and intervention groups in full compliance with Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols, and managed the end-to-end integration process across all three courses.1 This is substantive educational research — not routine TA work — and reflects a pattern of treating large-scale interventions as systems design problems.
Simultaneously, the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business at Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business selected Deshpande as one of 25 Graduate Sustainability Fellows for the 2023–24 academic year.3 The Center, named for Interface founder Ray Anderson who pivoted his carpet manufacturing company toward a zero-waste model, selects fellows from across Georgia Tech's colleges for demonstrated commitment to sustainable business. Deshpande wrote about her motivation: "The Center's vision of empowering the leaders of tomorrow to create sustainable businesses and communities resonates with my personal goals and interests."3
Click'd
Deshpande co-founded Click'd with Esha Saini in June 2024, the same month she transitioned from intern to full-time engineer at Humana.1 She handles the engineering side of the company — the technical counterpart to Saini's design and operations focus. On TikTok, where she posts regularly under @sakshid10, she has been the primary public voice explaining the product's core design rationale: "We want to create a space to share things about yourself that you'd want to share but might not have a reason to. That's why we made the Tiles in Click'd prompted and reciprocal."5
She announced V1's App Store launch with visible excitement: "ahhh so excited for this journey, click'd is now available for download on the App Store!"4 After V1, the founders rebuilt toward Click'd 2.0, currently in waitlist mode.2
Deshpande's training arc — from ALS pathology research to cloud infrastructure to sustainability curriculum design — is not a conventional path to consumer app founder. But the through line is a repeated pattern of building systems that change how people interact with information and with each other: a database for disease research, data pipelines for health insurance, a curriculum that reshapes how 1,500 CS students think about social impact, and finally an app that redesigns how close friends interact daily.15