In today’s edition: the most powerful woman in crypto, the secret weapon behind Mexico’s president, and an all-women deal in AI.
– Dealmakers. Jessica Wu, Sarah Guo, and Kimberly Tan are sitting on a Zoom call. Tan is an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, Guo is the investor behind the AI-focused firm Conviction, and Wu is the cofounder and CEO of the new startup Sola Solutions. The trio is behind one of the most exciting recent deals in enterprise AI—Sola has raised $21 million, Fortune is the first to report, $3.5 million in a seed round led by Conviction and $17.5 million in a Series A led by Andreessen.
It’s not intentional that it’s three women behind these deals, all three say. But it is unusual. None can recall being part of an all-women deal in AI before. “You go build a startup and you’re not exactly surrounded by a ton of women,” says Wu, 22.
Wu’s company, Sola, is aiming to drive the future of enterprise AI. It’s the next generation of RPA, or robotic process automation, a form of technology that handles repetitive tasks. The best-known RPA platform is UiPath, and Wu is designing her company to vastly improve that experience. “It required hundreds of consultants to come in and really operated on 1990s-era software that just constantly broke,” she says of traditional RPA.
Her company, which went through Y Combinator, relies on AI agents to complete these tasks instead. It’s one platform designed for end users who have no experience with AI—logistics, insurance, operational finance professionals, and more across the country. “It’s for old, verticalized, legacy businesses, and we do everything from send their invoices to build their shipments and do data entry into their healthcare portals—all the most manual, critical areas of the business,” Wu says.
Wu and her 23-year-old cofounder and CTO Neil Deshmukh dropped out of MIT. Wu had studied math and already worked for Citadel and Thrive Capital. Deshmukh has been obsessed with technology since he was a teen, when at 14 he created vision-based biometrics for his bedroom so his brother couldn’t get in.
But for this startup to work, the founders had to get outside of Silicon Valley. “In order to serve all of these people that don’t come from your own experience or technical understanding, you really have to have both product vision and a lot of empathy and the ability to rally people to your side,” Guo says of Wu. The founder has spent the past several months on the ground with freight brokerage leaders or with logistics customers at a golf conference, convincing them that this product would benefit their businesses. Sola’s AI can replace jobs that have traditionally be off-shored to workers in other countries.
“AI is this amazing, powerful technology, but it does require wrangling to get it to work for businesses,” says Tan, who invests in enterprise AI for Andreessen. “There’s a huge gap between what people know is theoretically possible and what you actually get in your day-to-day.”
What made Sola stand out to these investors was how it functions for non-technical users across every industry, rather than having to invest in industry-specific tools. “Eventually,” Wu says, “hopefully Sola can just take over all the manual work that people don’t really want to do.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"I felt the need to do something that I was 100% responsible for. I had been in a career for so long and then to start to be an entrepreneur—joining that mindset was a big switch."
— Trinny Woodall on founding her namesake beauty brand
