By Sheila Gulati, Founder and Managing Director of Tola Capital
One of my favorite things about investing is watching a founder get excited about a problem everyone else has decided is too hard. AI is creating more of those moments.
Founders are dreaming up things that simply weren’t possible a few years ago — new ways to solve stubborn enterprise problems, rethink workflows, and turn expertise into something that can be shared, scaled, and put to work.
Work can be more joyful
When we take away the repetitive, frustrating parts of a job, we give people more room for creativity, curiosity, and the work they actually wanted to do in the first place. People will marvel at how intelligence works for them in a way that is exactly bespoke to them and how they work best.
For startups, product velocity and keeping pace with customer feedback moves at a pace that aligns with the business while also feeling joyful.
That is the kind of intelligence we want to invest in.
Investing in Intelligence
At Tola, we partner with founders who see what becomes possible when intelligence is built into the way work gets done.
We have always been drawn to difficult enterprise problems. The ones buried in complex workflows, constrained by legacy systems, dependent on scarce expertise, or simply accepted because “that’s how it’s done.”
We are seeing founders rethink entire workflows from first principles. Sometimes that produces a dramatically better version of an existing product. Sometimes it creates an entirely new category.
Our Next Chapter
We have spent more than 15 years investing through major technology cycles and technical shifts and many more years beyond that collectively building and operating.
With each technology advancement, we’ve seen an expanded set of things software could do and change the economics of building and scaling companies.
AI is a major discontinuity, but with a particularly interesting property. We aren’t just giving people better tools to access information. We are making intelligence itself increasingly available as a building block. For the enterprise, the implications are enormous.
Navigating Disruption
Technology discontinuities are rarely tidy. The old world doesn’t disappear when the new one arrives. Both exist simultaneously, creating plenty of confusion. We’ve lived through having to fly the plane while making upgrades and how to traverse those challenges.
And we know that periods of discontinuity can create extraordinary opportunities for founders. That’s where we like to invest.
Building Connections
Great founders need customers who will take a chance on something new. They need exceptional people to join them. They need domain expertise, technical talent, distribution, capital, and sometimes someone who has seen a particular problem before and can help them avoid stepping into the same hole.
This is where our network matters. Tola remains headquartered in Seattle, though we have a global network. We have built relationships across time zones and continents across academia and industry.
The people we bring together, both within and outside of Tola, connect founders with the right resources at the right time.
Lean in when it matters and step back when it doesn’t
But there is an important second half to that ability to guide. We try to be useful when it matters and stay out of the way when it doesn’t.
A New Era for Tola
Our refreshed website is a chance to make this focus more explicit. After 15+ years of investing through major technology cycles and paradigm shifts, Tola is moving into a new era centered on intelligence.
We want to partner with founders building the next generation of intelligence companies — particularly those solving hard, consequential problems for the enterprise.
We want to meet the founders looking at a workflow everyone else has learned to tolerate and asking, Why are we still doing it this way? The founders who see a new technical capability and immediately start imagining what could be built on top of it. The founders who aren’t interested in AI for AI’s sake, but in what intelligence makes possible for businesses and the people who work in them.
The opportunity is to expand what people and companies are capable of doing. And along the way, make the work a little more interesting. A little more creative. And a lot more joyful. That’s the future we’re excited to invest in.