February 17, 2025
By Mikey Fuller
Most career paths don’t always travel in a straight line. Caitlin Leksana, ME 2016, knows that first-hand and has made it her goal to show students and alumni in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering that anything is possible.
Leksana went from focusing on mechanical engineering subjects like control systems, robotics, nanoengineering, and electrochemistry at Georgia Tech, to earning her Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard Business School, to starting her own business.
Leksana is the chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of Fazeshift, an early-stage venture capital-backed tech startup based in San Francisco that helps enterprises use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate complex financial processes.
In January, Fazeshift raised $4 million in seed funding from Gradient, Google’s early-stage AI fund, which will help the company grow the team, continue to build the most advanced AI agent, and bring this technology to more people around the world.
For Leksana, being CEO includes wearing many hats, taking on roles in sales, hiring, marketing, product development, and more. However, she spends most of her time focusing on helping her team have the resources they need to build the best product possible for their users.
“It’s always amazing to demo the product – every week we have people in awe at what our AI agent can do and what’s now possible with AI,” Leksana says. “It’s so energizing to be able to bring that to customers and help them solve a problem they’ve never been able to solve before.”
Starting a company was something Leksana says she dreamed of since she was at Georgia Tech and has been her biggest achievement so far. The experiences and knowledge Leksana gained as a mechanical engineering student taught her how to solve hard, complex, unbounded problems, which is something she runs into constantly in entrepreneurship.
“Mechanical engineer’s are good at not getting discouraged,” Leksana says. “They can think through ambiguity and complexity and figure out how to focus on what’s most important, which is what entrepreneurs do constantly.”
One thing that Leksana remembers about her time at the Institute was how entrepreneurial mechanical engineers are by nature.
“Mechanical engineers are always looking to build cool things and solve problems, which makes them great entrepreneurs, so I loved being surrounded by that while at Tech.” Leksana says.
As a Yellow Jacket, Leksana was also involved in the Consulting Club and performed with the Georgia Tech Color Guard. Today she remains involved with the Woodruff School as a member of the Woodruff Young Alumni Council (YAC), where she helps to increase engagement among mechanical engineering and nuclear and radiological engineering students and recent graduates.
Last summer, Leksana was accepted into the Y Combinator (YC) program - a three-month program that helps startup companies take off. YC was started in 2005 and has invested in more than 45,000 companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and DoorDash. In the 11 weeks of the program, participants learn how to improve their product and have more options for raising money. After they complete the three-month period, YC invests $500,000 for 7% of every company.
The most valuable lesson Leksana learned from YC is to not overthink, just talk to users. “The best startups aren’t the ones with the best ideas, but the ones that can execute on talking to customers and building a product people want to use,” she says.
The community of mentors and entrepreneurs at YC inspired Leksana to complete the program.
“YC has this amazing ability to bring together highly technical and ambitious founders, and the type of innovation that fosters is magical,” Leksana says. “It truly was incredible, and I’d encourage anyone who has a startup or wants to start one to apply to YC.”
YC may have helped shape Leksana to be the successful CEO and entrepreneur she is today, but she credits her experience as a Woodruff School student for providing her with a base for learning new things as well as chasing her dreams. That’s something she hopes students and alumni can learn from her experiences.
