How a 22-year-old raised $21M to automate enterprise workflows with AI

Executive overview

Most enterprise companies run critical operations on fragile, decades-old software that nobody can easily automate. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has existed for years, but legacy tools are brittle, expensive, and hard to implement.

Jessica Wu built Sola — an agentic process automation platform — to replace that legacy tooling with AI-native workflow automation. She raised $21M (seed from Conviction, Series A from a16z) by age 22, after validating the problem firsthand at a hedge fund and through her co-founder's experience at a hospital system.

Enterprises will trust a startup with their most critical workflows if you ship fast, listen obsessively, and never go down.

From hedge fund to founder

• Youngest quant researcher at a major hedge fund before starting Sola.
• Finance taught probabilistic thinking: calculate odds, stay objective, avoid emotional decisions.
• Startup decisions — which customer to take, which feature to build — map directly onto that rational framework.
• Co-founder hit the same problem independently while building hospital systems at MGH: legacy tooling was brittle and slow to implement.
• Both experiences were "lucky glimpses" into how most real-world companies actually operate.

Building and validating the product

• Sola started at YC with no fixed idea; spent the first month deciding what to build.
• YC's core advice: sell before you build. Put up a minimal front-end and find out if anyone will pay.
• First customer was told honestly the product didn't exist yet — they agreed to return once it did.
• MVP was a simple workflow recorder that ran automations on a single local machine.
• Now: record workflows, run them across hundreds of VMs at scale, add logic, edit in fine granularity, orchestrate at enterprise scale.
• Turned down large early customers when the product wasn't ready — painful, but protected product focus.

Winning and retaining enterprise customers

• 5x revenue growth in the current year; execution volume doubling month over month.
• Majority of new customers arrive via word of mouth from satisfied existing ones.
• Weekly calls with early design partners; rapid iteration on their feedback beats legacy incumbents on responsiveness.
• Worked Christmas Day to support a major customer deployment — set the tone for reliability expectations.
• Sola can never go down: if it does, invoices don't go out, shipments don't move, patient data doesn't get entered.
• Reliability and support quality are the startup's primary competitive advantages over 20-year-old incumbents.

Navigating the founder experience

• Startup pace compresses highs and lows: best moment and worst news can happen within two hours of each other.
• Comfort comes from internalising that things return to baseline — provided you're in the right market with the right people.
• When under pressure, immediately reach for advisors and experienced voices rather than deciding alone.
• MIT trained the habit of staying close to the frontier: always know what's being researched, always spend time with the people doing it.
• Technical grounding helps break any problem into its root form — which is the only reliable way to deliver real value.