Automation’s been promising freedom since the first assembly line, but let’s be honest, it’s mostly meant “hope you enjoy babysitting a robot that crashes when someone updates Excel.” Enter Sola, the AI-native process automation platform out of New York City, fresh out of stealth with $21 million in funding, including a $17.5 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. When Andreessen Horowitz calls in Kimberly Tan and Jennifer Li to anchor a round, you know the stakes are real. Add Sarah Guo’s Conviction, Y Combinator, and Pioneer Fund into the mix, and you’ve got a cap table that reads like a masterclass in picking winners.
The founders, Jessica Wu and Neil Deshmukh, are barely old enough to rent a car without extra insurance, yet they’re already rewriting what automation even means. Jessica Wu took her math and computer science chops from MIT through Citadel Securities, Goldentree Asset Management, and Thrive Capital, where she became the youngest quant at a billion-dollar hedge fund before deciding manual document grind wasn’t her forever gig. Neil Deshmukh, also MIT-trained, went deep into AI research at MIT-IBM Watson and Quest for Intelligence Labs, sharpening computer vision and multimodal learning before steering his skills toward building machines that don’t just follow rules, they learn, adapt, and self-heal.
That’s the Sola difference. These aren’t brittle macros dressed up in enterprise software. These are agentic AI bots that watch a workflow once, then replicate it with the stubbornness of a litigator and the precision of a neurosurgeon. They navigate both browser-based chaos and legacy desktop apps without waiting for some poor developer to build an API. Fortune 100 companies, Am Law 100 law firms, and billion-dollar players in healthcare and logistics are already in production, automating millions of workflows and cutting error rates while deploying in days instead of months. Clients like Morgan & Morgan, Ally Logistics, FirstBase.io, and Kintsugi are watching the definition of “business process outsourcing” get turned inside out.
What makes this story more than a funding headline is the market Sola is gunning for. Traditional RPA vendors chased checklists and compliance, Sola is going after the workflows that have lived in the shadows because they were too messy, too human, too variable for software. That’s a trillion-dollar opportunity hiding in plain sight.
So when Jessica Wu and Neil Deshmukh say they’re scaling their engineering team in New York City to push agentic automation further, it’s not a moonshot. It’s the quiet start of a new era where “automation” doesn’t mean replacing humans with scripts, but arming industries with systems smart enough to handle the work nobody wanted to touch in the first place.
