Today's edition features the most powerful women in Crypto, the secret weapon behind the Mexican president, and the all-women's contract in AI.
– Trader. Jessica Wu, Sarah Guo and Kimberly Tang sit on a Zoom Call. Tan is an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, Guo is the investor behind the AI-focused company convictions, and Wu is the co-founder and CEO of new startup Sola Solutions. The trio is in one of the most exciting recent deals in Enterprise AI. Sora raised $21 million. luck The first reports were $3.5 million in the seed round led by the conviction and $17.5 million in the Series A led by Andreessen.
All three say it's not intentional to be the three women behind these deals. But that's rare. I can't remember that it was previously part of an all-women's contract with AI. “You build a startup, but you're not exactly surrounded by a lot of women,” says Wu, 22.
Sola, a WU company, aims to promote the future of enterprise AI. The next generation of RPA, or automation of robotic processes, a form of technology that handles repetitive tasks. The most well-known RPA platform is Uipath, and Wu has designed her company to significantly improve that experience. “We had to have hundreds of consultants in and they were actually running on 1990s Ella Software.
Her company, who has passed the Y-combinator, relies instead on AI agents to complete these tasks. This is one platform designed for end users with no experience in AI. This is nationally, domestic, insurance, operational finance experts and more. “It's for old, vertical legacy businesses, everything from sending invoices to building cargo and entering data into the medical portal, to doing all the key areas of the business in every manual,” says Wu.
Wu and her 23-year-old co-founder and CTO Neil Deshmukh have dropped out of MIT. Wu studied mathematics and was already working in the Citadel and the prosperous capital. Deshmukh has been obsessed with technology since his teenage years, and at age 14 he couldn't get his younger brother into, so he created vision-based biometrics in his bedroom.
However, for the startup to function, its founders had to go outside of Silicon Valley. “To serve all these people who don't come from your own experience or technical understanding, you really need to have both a product vision and a lot of empathy, and the ability to bring people together on your side,” Guo said of Wu. The founder spends the past few months on the ground with logistics customers at freight broker leaders and golf meetings, and is confident that this product will benefit the business. Sola's AI can replace jobs that have traditionally been offset by workers in other countries.
“AI is this incredible, powerful technology, but it needs to be fought to make it work for the company,” says Tan, who invests in Andreessen's Enterprise AI. “There's a huge gap between what people know in theory and what you actually get to everyday.”
What set Sora apart with these investors wasn't the need to invest in industry-specific tools, but how it works for non-technical users in all industries. “In the end, Sora hopes he can take over all the manual tasks people don't really want to do.”
Emma Hinchliff
Emma.Hinchliffe@Fortune.com
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Also in the headline
– Chip crazy. Lisa Su is on a roll this year. At the heart of the AI race, the Trump administration's AI strategy and the war with Nvidia, AMD CEO is also at the heart of the US-China tech war. The new profile will allow everyone to spend time with the CEO they want in their corner. Wired
– Crypto Power. The most powerful woman in Crypto is Yi He, co-founder of Binance (sharing her child on Binance's Changpeng Zhao). I first spoke with him a few years ago when she first appeared as a public figure. My colleague Jeff John Roberts returns to her story after piloting two-way through recent trials, including CZ's prison sentence. luck
– Job alerts. Women's sports are on the rise, but it has been difficult for teams and leagues to match the talents of the business side. From viral t-shirts to movies and TV shows, the startup TogethXR behind everything, has debuted a new job board for the latest jobs in women's sports.
– Business whispers. The key to President Claudia Sinbaum's success in Mexico is Altagrasia Gomez Sierra. Gomez Sierra, heir to corn estate in his early 30s Bloomberg
With my radar
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Words of farewell
“I felt I had to be 100% responsible. I started to become an entrepreneur after a long career. That mindset was a huge switch.”
– Trinny Woodall founded her beauty brand of the same name
