AI startup Sol has emerged from stealth with $4 million in funding led by General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from DeVC, Peercheque, and Kunal Shah.
The AI startup will use the fresh capital to support research and development as well as go-to-market initiatives. In addition, Sol plans to allocate funding towards LLM processing and tooling costs, hiring, and working with customers across different markets.
Founded in August 2025 by Anish Karan, Prateek Srivastava, and Ranjith Nair, Sol is developing a proactive AI assistant that identifies commitments users make through email and begins working on the tasks required to fulfil them.
The startup primarily targets founders, executives, and professionals in sales, marketing, consulting, recruiting, and agencies who manage significant volumes of email as part of their daily work.
Sol aims to address a common workplace challenge: professionals frequently make commitments through email, such as sending an analysis, sharing a proposal, reviewing a document, or arranging a meeting. However, completing these commitments often requires users to work across multiple applications and tools.
Instead of asking users to create separate tasks or issue additional prompts, Sol identifies commitments and their surrounding context directly from Gmail. It then begins preparing the work required to complete those commitments.
For instance, when a user commits to sending an analysis, Sol can conduct research and prepare a document. Similarly, when an email involves coordinating with another person, the assistant can propose a meeting based on the context.
Beyond these capabilities, Sol can create presentations, draft email responses, and coordinate meetings. The startup therefore aims to move AI assistance beyond simple prompt-based interactions and towards proactive task execution.
“People whose work runs through email often have to repeat themselves: first in email, then again when they ask an AI tool to act. There’s no good reason for that. If I’ve already said I’ll do something, there should be an AI that gets started on it. We shouldn’t have to become experts in AI to benefit from it. AI should learn how to use the right tools and skills behind the scenes so people can focus on the work they’re uniquely good at while Sol does the heavy lifting and gives them a simple way to approve or edit the work,” said Anish Karan, CEO of Sol.
Sol operates through a dedicated computer environment that allows the assistant to use a browser and work across different tools. Furthermore, the system has a library of more than 100 skills designed to handle different types of professional tasks.
However, the assistant keeps users in control of final actions. Sol cannot send, schedule, or share anything without the user’s approval. Users can review, edit, or approve the work before the assistant takes any external action.
Users can also connect their Gmail accounts to Sol, enabling the assistant to identify what the startup calls “open loops” in their inboxes. The system does not require users to manually tag, forward, or file emails before it can identify these outstanding commitments.
On the data privacy front, Sol states that it does not use customer information to train AI models. The startup also said that its AI providers have configured their systems to disable training on customer data.
Sol currently operates through selective access as the company prepares to expand availability. Meanwhile, General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners have backed the startup’s approach to developing AI assistants that can act proactively rather than relying primarily on individual user prompts.
Akarsh Shrivastava, partner at General Catalyst, said the founders’ approach to the problem and product design had stood out to the firm.
“Sol’s problem is simple and deeply felt: if you’ve said you’ll do something, AI should already be doing it. Their consumer obsession and design philosophy stood out to us, and that’s exactly what this moment needs,” Shrivastava said.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, partner at Nexus Venture Partners, said, “What got us excited about Sol is that Anish and team are building AI that just knows when to act and proactively does the right things. There is no learning curve; it’s AI that just works.”
With its new funding, Sol plans to advance its underlying AI technology, expand its team, and increase customer adoption as it develops its vision for proactive AI-powered workplace assistance.
