Tola Capital

Tola Capital invests globally in seed and early-stage AI and enterprise software companies, providing founders with capital and operating expertise. Its team works with portfolio companies on product roadmaps, growth, and go-to-market strategy. Its investment focus spans agentic applications and tooling, AI-native data infrastructure, inference infrastructure, physical AI, and governance and security. These areas cover software that executes enterprise workflows, tools for evaluating and controlling agents, and infrastructure for serving models efficiently.

Founded in Seattle in 2010 by Sheila Gulati and Stacey Giard, Tola grew out of their experience at Microsoft and conviction in cloud computing. Gulati remains managing director; Giard is a venture partner. Gulati previously led Microsoft’s enterprise IT strategy and launched Azure, while Giard led marketing and sales programs around SQL Server and Azure. Tola also publishes practical analysis for AI builders, including a foundation-model selection framework that weighs cost, deployment speed, latency, flexibility and transparency, and security and governance.

Tola closed its $230 million Fund III in 2023 to invest in seed and early-stage AI startups. At that announcement, the firm reported having invested more than $400 million in 51 startups since inception. Its portfolio has included Pulumi, Klarity, Simpplr, and Nooks, alongside Clipchamp, which Microsoft acquired in 2021.