A Chinese girl born after 2000 dropped out of MIT to start a business and has raised 150 million yuan.
The AI startup wave among post - 2000s has arrived! A Chinese - American girl dropped out of MIT to start a business and secured $21 million in financing (equivalent to 150 million RMB).
The company is directly targeting the Copilot in the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) field.
Established for only two years, its client list already includes Fortune 100 companies worldwide, AmLaw 100 firms, and leading billion - dollar enterprises in the healthcare and logistics sectors.
The startup Sola Solutions founded by Chinese - American girl Jessica Wu has been making waves in the venture capital circle recently. It has successively received two rounds of investment led by a16z and Conviction respectively, with a total financing amount of up to 150 million RMB.
Like the four founders of Cursor, she and another founder, Neil Deshmukh, are both post - 2000s and dropped out of MIT to start a business.
However, the labels on Jessica Wu go far beyond that. She straddles mathematics, computer science, and finance. She founded a fashion design company, conducted quantitative research at a hedge fund, and has experience in medical technology, cryptocurrency... These are all areas she has explored.
In today's terms, she is a proper slash youth, and even a Plus version.
Now, she has set her sights on the AI automation processes of traditional enterprises.
The company raised 150 million RMB in financing
Jessica Wu founded the company Sola Solutions in 2023. At that time, it received incubation support from the Summer 2023 batch of Y Combinator (YC S23), and Y Combinator also participated in the investment in the early seed round.
Headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, the initial team, including her and another co - founder, only had a total of five people.
The company positions itself as the Copilot in the RPA field, aiming to help client teams build automated processing processes through LLM and computer vision and assist in solving complex repetitive tasks.
Users only need to record the operation process, and the system will automatically generate robot scripts. Whether on the desktop or in the browser, manual archiving and data extraction in the process can be easily achieved.
For example, Sola can use built - in AI to help users extract, verify, and build data from documents. It can also play a role in cross - team collaboration, providing real - time information on the entire workflow for easy tracking and supervision.
In addition, the system can automatically adjust logic and correct errors based on user feedback and process changes. Without programming skills, any business person can edit the automated process.
Since the beginning of this year, Sola's revenue has increased fivefold, and its workflow volume has doubled month - on - month.
Now, Sola has been applied in multiple industries such as financial services, law, insurance, and healthcare, and also provides services for leading enterprises such as the world's top 100 Fortune companies.
Michael Frederickson, the project management director of JPMorgan Chase, once commented:
With Sola, our legal operations team can create robots without developers. Sola makes automation accessible.
Sola has publicly completed a total financing of $21 million (equivalent to 150 million RMB). In the seed round, Guo Rui, the founder of Conviction, led the investment with $3.5 million.
In the latest Series A financing round, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) took the lead, and Conviction continued to participate, with a total of $17.5 million.
After the inflow of new funds, Sola plans to expand its engineering and product teams, advance the company's listing strategy, and develop its partner ecosystem to support wider enterprise adoption.
When talking about the reason for choosing to invest in such an AI startup composed of young people, Guo Rui said that for a startup to really make a difference, the founder must leave Silicon Valley.
And Jessica Wu is exactly like this. In the past few months, she has been working on - site with traditional customers who are not familiar with AI products to promote her own products.
Sola can stand out among many investors precisely because it is not a tool exclusive to certain specific industries but can cover non - technical users in every industry. Jessica Wu responded:
We hope that Sola can ultimately take over all the manual labor that people actually don't want to do.
Cross - border in mathematics/computer science/finance
Don't be fooled by the fact that she is a post - 2000s. Jessica Wu is quite experienced in the field of entrepreneurship.
While studying mathematics and computer science at MIT, Jessica Wu has been exploring the intersection of finance and technology. Her research areas include algebraic number theory, chaos theory, AI, and software construction.
Under the guidance of Professor James Yorke, she tried to use Python programs to simulate chaotic systems and combinatorial problems and developed a new physics - based analysis to advance the prediction of chaotic systems in a finite state.
She also studied real - analysis and cryptography under Professor Lawrence Washington and engaged in research related to unique factorization and almost Euclidean functions.
Meanwhile, she participated in engineering design at startups in medical technology, cryptocurrency, etc. In addition, she founded a fashion design company called Graffewear and was responsible for developing and managing the website to increase user engagement.
She has worked in the financial field (such as hedge funds like Citadel Securities, Goldentree AM, Thrive Capital) in venture capital, quantitative research, and trading. She became the youngest quantitative researcher in a billion - dollar hedge fund.
It was precisely based on her financial work experience that when she experienced the inefficient traditional RPA tools, she was determined to create a more intuitive and intelligent automation solution by herself.
She found Neil Deshmukh, who had been her good friend since freshman year and also graduated from MIT, majoring in computer science. Before this, they had collaborated many times and had great chemistry with each other.
So, they hit it off this time and dropped out of MIT together to focus on starting the business of Sola.
Neil Deshmukh is a typical tech geek. At the age of 14, he created vision - based biometric technology for his bedroom to ensure that his brothers would not break in.
During his studies at MIT, he focused on promoting cross - domain artificial intelligence innovation. He led research on computer vision and large language models in the joint laboratory of MIT and IBM, with a focus on multimodal reinforcement learning.
Previously, he served as the chief software and machine learning engineer at Moonbear Bio, responsible for developing a no - code machine learning platform for biologists in various biological fields (such as proteomics, genomics, pathology, etc.).
In addition, like Jessica Wu, he has also been the founder of several companies.
These include VocalEyes, which builds accessibility technology for the visually impaired, and PlantumAI, an application that can directly diagnose and provide treatment plans for plant diseases through mobile phones.
In this founding of Sola, they divided the work. Jessica Wu is mainly responsible for integrating her product, design, and financial experience into Sola, leading product decisions, user experience, and market promotion, while Neil Deshmukh is more responsible for technology implementation.
The emergence of Sola comes at a time when global enterprises are increasing their investment in back - office automation. For some traditional industries, AI software services can reduce the workload by 20% to 40%, saving costs while increasing productivity.
Compared with other AI - driven automation startups, under the leadership of Jessica Wu and Neil Deshmukh, Sola always maintains a differentiated advantage. It combines the AI - native architecture with accessibility for non - engineers, which is particularly beneficial for teams with limited IT bandwidth but high demand for efficiency improvement.
OMT
Now, on the wave of AI entrepreneurship, the era of post - 2000s has truly arrived.
In addition to Jessica Wu, Hong Letong, a 00 - after Stanford mathematics doctor who also graduated from MIT as an undergraduate, started a business in the financial quantitative AI track and achieved a company valuation of 300 million RMB with 0 products and 0 users.
Chen Yuanpei, the co - founder of Lingchu Intelligence, a leading company in the field of embodied intelligence in China, is also a post - 2000s. He is not only a visiting scholar at Stanford University, studying under Fei - Fei Li and Karen Liu, but also was the first in the world to use reinforcement learning to control the multi - skills operations of both arms and hands in the real world.
Yin Xiaoyue, the founder and CEO of Yunsi Intelligence, graduated from the University of Washington in the United States. As a post - 2000s, she returned to China to start a business right after graduation and is committed to full - process services in the field of AI programming.
Anysphere, the parent company of the AI programming assistant Cursor, was also founded by several post - 2000s, including Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Now, its valuation has soared to $9.9 billion.
Coincidentally, they also dropped out of MIT to start a business...
The three founders of the AI automatic recruitment system Mercor are all post - 2000s and then successively dropped out of Harvard University and Georgetown University. Now, the platform has more than 460,000 cumulative active job seekers, and its clients include tech giants such as OpenAI.
So, is there some kind of success - flag when post - 2000s drop out of school to start an AI business? (doge)
Reference links:
[1]https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jessica - wu - 9824431ab_seriesa - ai - automation - activity - 7361765088912896001 - J0ik/
[2]https://jessicaywu.com/[3]https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sola
[4]https://www.neildeshmukh.com/about
[5]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PuzILc8xvmlZ8P7eOmwY7Q
[6]https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/sola - solutions - ai - startup - raised - 21 - million - andreessen - sarah - guo/