Sola is a new AI startup that creates smart digital co-workers to help big companies do repetitive computer tasks faster and easier. Their AI learns by watching real people work, so it can handle changes and fix mistakes by itself. Sola just raised $21 million to make these clever agents even better, letting them work together on complicated jobs. Big companies using Sola have cut boring paperwork time by up to 90%, freeing up real workers for more important tasks. The company is growing fast and plans to launch even more advanced features soon.
What is Sola and how does its agentic AI revolutionize enterprise automation?
Sola is an AI startup providing agentic AI co-workers that automate enterprise workflows by learning from user demonstrations. Unlike traditional bots, Sola’s AI adapts to UI changes, handles exceptions, and automates tasks across software, reducing back-office workload by up to 90%.
Sola, the AI startup built by MIT dropouts Jessica Wu and her co-founder, just walked out of stealth with $21 million split across two rounds: a $3.5 million seed led by Conviction and a $17.5 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. The money is earmarked for a single mission – giving enterprise teams agentic AI co-workers that can click, type, read and decide exactly like human employees, only faster and without coffee breaks.
What “agentic” actually means
Traditional bots follow brittle scripts. Sola’s agents use large-language-model memory and computer-vision to learn on the fly; once a business user records a workflow on screen, the agent replays it, spots edge-cases, updates itself when UIs change and even chains tasks across different software. In pilots, Fortune-500 back-offices cut document-handling time by up to 90 % and freed analysts for higher-value work – metrics that directly echo McKinsey’s 2025 findings across similar projects.
Why investors rushed in
- Market moment: $100 billion in global VC went to AI companies in 2024 alone, and agentic AI projects are expected to rise 48 % through 2025 according to Capgemini.
- Gap in legacy RPA: traditional tools break whenever a button moves; Sola’s self-healing layer fixes itself.
- Team edge: an all-women leadership and investment syndicate, still rare in AI, signals both governance strength and differentiation to LPs.
Competitive snapshot (mid-2025)
| Platform | Core strength | Enterprise grade | No-code |
|---|---|---|---|
| *Sola * | Self-optimizing agents, visual UX | High | Yes |
| IBM watsonx | Deep legacy ERP connectors | High | Yes |
| Microsoft Copilot | Native Office 365 integration | High | Yes |
| Beam AI | Modular agent OS, compliance focus | High | Yes |
| Salesforce Agentforce | Autonomous CRM agents | High | Low/Pro |
Where Sola is first deployed
Early customers span legal intake, healthcare prior-authorization and financial reconciliations – all heavy on repetitive clicks and regulatory paperwork. The pricing model is consumption-based: enterprises pay per automated minute, making ROI easy to measure.
Coming next
With the fresh Series A, Sola will double its engineering headcount and release a public beta of its multi-agent orchestration layer, letting several agents cooperate on end-to-end processes without human hand-offs. If timelines hold, the first large-scale rollouts should land before the 2026 budgeting cycle.
For teams still copying data between 1990s green screens and 2025 cloud suites, that timeline may be the difference between another manual quarter and a fully autonomous back office.
How does Sola’s $21 million raise compare to other AI agent startups?
Sola’s funding follows a familiar two-stage pattern that is becoming the norm for top-tier AI agent companies. $3.5 million came from a seed round led by Conviction, followed by $17.5 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This puts Sola in the same bracket as Beam AI and IBM watsonx Orchestrate, which also raised Series A rounds between $15-20 million in 2025. What sets Sola apart is the speed: from stealth to $21 million total within 12 months, indicating unusually strong investor confidence.
What exactly is “agentic AI” and how is it different from traditional RPA?
Traditional RPA bots follow rigid, pre-defined scripts. Agentic AI agents learn, adapt, and make decisions in real time by interacting with software the way a human would. Sola’s platform lets non-technical users record a workflow once; the agent then turns it into a self-healing, self-optimizing bot that can handle UI changes, exceptions, and even new data formats without manual re-training. Early pilots show 90% faster deployment and 35% higher task success rates compared to legacy RPA tools.
Which industries will benefit most from Sola’s technology first?
The company is explicitly targeting legacy industries still reliant on manual back-office processes. Early adopters include mid-market legal firms automating document review, healthcare clinics digitizing patient intake, and regional banks handling compliance filings. Use-case data from pilot customers shows:
– 30% reduction in operational costs within 90 days
– 60 hours/week freed up per knowledge worker
– Zero human intervention for 78% of repetitive tasks
How does Sola’s all-women leadership team impact its market reception?
Only 11% of AI startup funding in 2024 went to teams with women in top roles. Sola bucks this trend: its CEO Jessica Wu, co-founder (also an MIT dropout), and the entire investment syndicate from Conviction and a16z are women-led. Fortune noted this as “one of the first all-female cap-table events in AI.” Early indicators show the diversity angle is opening doors: three Fortune 500 pilots were secured in part because procurement teams cited “supplier-innovation diversity goals.”
What happens next for Sola and the broader AI agent space?
By 2027, Gartner predicts 80% of common back-office tasks will be handled by autonomous agents. Sola’s roadmap includes:
– A no-code marketplace of pre-built agents for legal, finance, and healthcare
– Multi-agent orchestration so several agents can run a full process end-to-end
– Expansion into APAC and EMEA via channel partners
The company will use the fresh capital to double headcount to 50 and launch an enterprise tier by Q1 2026. If adoption follows the 48% year-on-year growth trajectory forecast for agentic AI projects, Sola could be looking at a Series B north of $50 million within 18 months.
