In today\u2019s edition: the most powerful woman in crypto, the secret weapon behind Mexico\u2019s president, and an all-women deal in AI. <\/p>\n
\u2013 Dealmakers.<\/strong> Jessica Wu, Sarah Guo, and Kimberly Tan are sitting on a Zoom call. Tan is an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, Guo is the investor behind the AI-focused firm Conviction<\/a>, and Wu is the cofounder and CEO of the new startup Sola Solutions. The trio is behind one of the most exciting recent deals in enterprise AI\u2014Sola has raised $21 million, Fortune is the first to report, $3.5 million in a seed round led by Conviction and $17.5 million in a Series A led by Andreessen. <\/p>\n It\u2019s not intentional that it\u2019s three women behind these deals, all three say. But it is unusual. None can recall being part of an all-women deal in AI before. \u201cYou go build a startup and you\u2019re not exactly surrounded by a ton of women,\u201d says Wu, 22. <\/p>\n Wu\u2019s company, Sola, is aiming to drive the future of enterprise AI. It\u2019s the next generation of RPA, or robotic process automation, a form of technology that handles repetitive tasks. The best-known RPA platform is UiPath, and Wu is designing her company to vastly improve that experience. \u201cIt required hundreds of consultants to come in and really operated on 1990s-era software that just constantly broke,\u201d she says of traditional RPA. <\/p>\n Her company, which went through Y Combinator, relies on AI agents to complete these tasks instead. It\u2019s one platform designed for end users who have no experience with AI\u2014logistics, insurance, operational finance professionals, and more across the country. \u201cIt\u2019s for old, verticalized, legacy businesses, and we do everything from send their invoices to build their shipments and do data entry into their healthcare portals\u2014all the most manual, critical areas of the business,\u201d Wu says. <\/p>\n Wu and her 23-year-old cofounder and CTO Neil Deshmukh dropped out of MIT. Wu had studied math and already worked for Citadel and Thrive Capital. Deshmukh has been obsessed with technology since he was a teen, when at 14 he created vision-based biometrics for his bedroom so his brother couldn\u2019t get in. <\/p>\n But for this startup to work, the founders had to get outside of Silicon Valley. \u201cIn order to serve all of these people that don\u2019t come from your own experience or technical understanding, you really have to have both product vision and a lot of empathy and the ability to rally people to or to your side,\u201d Guo says of Wu. The founder has spent the past several months on the ground with freight brokerage leaders or with logistics customers at a golf conference, convincing them that this product would benefit their businesses. Sola\u2019s AI can replace jobs that have traditionally be off-shored to workers in other countries. <\/p>\n \u201cAI is this amazing, powerful technology, but it does require wrangling to get it to work for businesses,\u201d says Tan, who invests in enterprise AI for Andreessen. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge gap between what people know is theoretically possible and what you actually get in your day-to-day.\u201d <\/p>\n What made Sola stand out to these investors was how it functions for non-technical users across every industry, rather than having to invest in industry-specific tools. \u201cEventually,\u201d Wu says, \u201chopefully Sola can just take over all the manual work that people don\u2019t really want to do.\u201d <\/p>\n Emma Hinchliffe The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune\u2019s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n ALSO IN THE HEADLINES<\/p>\n – Chip crazy.<\/strong> Lisa Su has been on a roll this year. At the center of the AI race, the Trump administration’s AI strategy, and at war with Nvidia\u2014the AMD CEO will be at the center of a U.S.-China tech war, too. A new profile spends time with the CEO everyone wants in their corner:\u00a0Wired<\/a><\/p>\n – Crypto power.<\/strong> The most powerful women in crypto is Yi He, the cofounder of Binance (who shares children with Binance’s Changpeng Zhao). I first spoke with He a few years ago<\/a>, when she was first emerging as a public figure. My colleague Jeff John Roberts dives back into her story after she’s steered Binance through its recent ordeals, including CZ’s prison sentence.\u00a0Fortune<\/a><\/p>\n – Job alert.<\/strong> Women’s sports are on the rise\u2014but it’s often been hard for teams and leagues to match with business-side talent. The startup Togethxr, which is behind everything from a viral t-shirt to movies and TV shows, debuted a new job board<\/a> for the latest jobs in women’s sports.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n – Business whisperer.<\/strong> Key to President Claudia Sheinbaum’s success in Mexico is Altagracia G\u00f3mez Sierra. An heir to a corn-flour fortune in her early 30s, G\u00f3mez Sierra helps Sheinbaum liaise with the business world\u2014and with the U.S. Bloomberg<\/a><\/p>\n ON MY RADAR<\/p>\n How Tuckernuck went from fashion outsider to ecommerce darling\u00a0Business of Fashion<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Why marriage survives\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n A new chapter for Tory Burch\u00a0Vogue<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n PARTING WORDS<\/p>\n “I felt the need to do something that I was 100% responsible for. I had been in a career for so long and then to start to be an entrepreneur\u2014joining that mindset was a big switch.”\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n \u2014 Trinny Woodall on founding her namesake beauty brand<\/a><\/p>\n
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n