Anish Karan
Co-founder and CEO, Sol
About
Anish Karan is the co-founder and chief executive of Sol, a proactive AI assistant built by Sol Foundry Inc. He started the company in August 2025 with Prateek Srivastava and Ranjith Nair, both of whom had worked with him at fintech company CRED, where Karan was in the product team. Sol reads a user's Gmail for commitments such as promises to send an analysis or set up a meeting, then starts the work itself, preparing research, documents, slides, reply drafts or calendar invites, and holds everything for the user's approval before anything is sent. The company came out of stealth in September 2026 with $4 million from General Catalyst, Nexus Venture Partners, DeVC, Peercheque and Kunal Shah. Karan told Inc42 that he spoke to about 55 enterprise teams in the US, South Korea and Australia while testing the idea, and that the product is aimed first at individual professionals before an enterprise sales push. Sol is his second startup: in 2016 he was one of four co-founders of HopCar, a Delhi used-car marketplace that merged with Spinny, after which the HopCar team joined Spinny's core team.
General Catalyst partner Akarsh Shrivastava, announcing the investment, described Karan as a second-time founder and credited him with making referrals a leading growth channel for eighteen months, without naming the company. Sol says the funding will go to research and development, including model and tooling costs, hiring and work with customers. At launch the product was open through a waitlist, ran on Google Workspace, and was pre-revenue, with Karan telling Inc42 that pricing would be usage- or outcome-based with a fixed component.
Source: indianstartupnews.com
