Sola

By Pranav Reddy and Sarah Guo, on behalf of Conviction

Sola launches today, to build next-generation, enterprise automation that actually works, with $21M of funding.

The last generation attempt at general enterprise automation, called Robotic Process Automation (RPA), has a logical and familiar thesis. A lot of work is monotonous and repetitive. No one at your company knows better what wastes time than the domain experts, the operators themselves, so the best people to work on those automations are operators — “citizen developers.” Non-technical users, who understand and live the work, building automations for themselves.

In practice, none of the past generation worked this way. Enterprises spent tens of millions of dollars each on consultants and spun up “centers of excellence,” to centralize these efforts, which masked the fact that the tools required trained professionals to use and were brutally fragile even in the best of cases. The technology couldn't match the demand.

We spent years looking for a better solution. Customers did too.

Computer use and vision language models are changing the equation. For the first time, we can build robotic systems that reason and act like humans: they can recover and respond to website changes, they are robust to variance in input, and they can reliably operate on thousands of inputs. These systems are for the first time possible, but still difficult to build. Anyone who's tried Operator or CUA has seen they're barely reliable for individual tasks, much less for the hundreds of thousands scale common for real world automation use cases. They remain slow, with the wrong abstractions and product surface for nontechnical end users.

Building modern enterprise automation requires a combination of customer-obsession with the ability to push the research frontier — a perfect fit for Jessica, Neil and the Sola team.

We met Jessica & Neil late one night almost two years ago. They had just dropped out of MIT a couple months prior, with serendipitous exposure to last generation automation in their work within finance and healthcare. They had decided weeks earlier that they would build modern enterprise automation. The world of back office automation is opaque to most engineers, much less MIT undergrads, yet in weeks, they could not only speak the language, but had a product vision and signed design partners.

Jessica and Neil are uniquely talented, and uniquely determined. From piano to competitive math to trading at Citadel, Jessica gets obsessed, and her expectations for excellence, especially when directed at a customer experience, are infectious. Neil, when he wasn't building AI applications for recognizing plant disease for relatives in India (which spread virally amongst rural villages) to locking his brother out of his room with homemade biometrics, was tinkering with the latest models and reimplementing, (even disproving) academic AI research for fun and profit.

They lived in a house two blocks away from Golden Gate Park for their entire summer in the city, but spent so much of it working indoors that they still couldn't navigate to it. Neil's personal desk set-up at our office had enough monitors and Celsius for half a dozen engineers. Van Phu, a former employer and mentor, told us repeatedly that “Jessica is just going to win. She has that dog in her,” which remains our favorite reference we've ever done. The whole Sola team celebrated Christmas at the office together last year, taking round the clock shifts to make sure a customer deployment was working.

Sola is finally delivering on the mission of empowering “citizen developers.” Sola makes automating your work as simple as recording a few demonstrations and iterating on an intuitive, Figma-like workflow canvas to cover your edge cases. Customers love how easy and powerful it is.Some of them have individual employees who, without any technical background, have built dozens of workflows themselves and have run thousands of times. Sola doesn't just save our customers thousands of hours, it also enables them to hand off the most monotonous parts of their job to an intelligent, adaptive teammate.

In short, enterprise automation that actually works.

We're excited today to welcome Andreessen-Horowitz as new investors and are grateful to work alongside YC as well. If you've “got that dog in you,” you should be at Sola. We're hiring across engineering, sales, and operations roles, based in NYC.