ISN Team26 Sep 2026
15:15IST
New Update
Proactive 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.
Sol said the funding will be used for research and development and go-to-market initiatives. Its R&D spending will include 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 an AI assistant that identifies commitments made in emails and starts working on the tasks needed to fulfil them.
Sol is designed for people whose work involves large volumes of email, including founders, executives and professionals working in sales, marketing, consulting, recruiting and agencies.
The startup is trying to address a familiar problem: people frequently make commitments over email, such as promising to send an analysis, share a proposal, review something or arrange a meeting, but completing those tasks often requires work across several tools.
Rather than requiring users to create another task or give an AI assistant a separate prompt, Sol identifies commitments and the context around them from Gmail and begins preparing the required work.
For example, a commitment to send an analysis can prompt Sol to carry out research and prepare a document. A promise to coordinate with someone can lead it to propose a meeting.
The assistant can also create presentations, draft email replies and coordinate meetings.
“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 its assistant in a dedicated computer environment, where it can use a browser to work across different tools. The system also has a library of more than 100 skills for handling different types of work.
The assistant cannot send anything without the user’s final approval.
Users can review, edit or approve its work, and nothing is sent, scheduled or shared until they give their approval.
Users can connect Gmail to Sol, allowing the product to identify what it calls “open loops” in their inbox without requiring emails to be manually tagged, forwarded or filed.
The startup states that customer information is not used to train AI models and that its AI providers are configured to disable training on customer data.
Sol is currently available through selective access as the company prepares to make the product more widely available.
General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners have backed Sol’s attempt to move beyond AI tools that depend primarily on users issuing individual 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.”
