Bolo AI Raises $8.1M Seed with Custom AI for Energy

In the energy sector, capital project overruns have become the norm. According to McKinsey, 80% of major projects go over budget, by an average of $1.2 billion, while delays can stretch timelines by six months to two years. With more than $3.5 trillion in capital spending globally each year, the inefficiencies are huge. That’s the gap Palo Alto-based Bolo AI is aiming to close with artificial intelligence, by making it the operating system for heavy industries.

Founded last year by Diti Sood and Dr. Lalit Jain, Bolo AI just raised an $8.1 million seed round led by True Ventures, with participation from Benchstrength, Accomplice, J Ventures, and Beat Ventures. The funding will accelerate Bolo’s mission to build a “system of action” tailored to frontline industrial workers, an AI-powered platform that helps teams move faster, make safer decisions, and make use of knowledge from siloed legacy systems.

“I founded Bolo AI with a mission very close to my heart: to make daily work faster, safer, and better for the heavy industry worker,” said CEO Diti Sood to SiliconANGLE. “I have this rare background that combines field experience and tech, which gives me an unfair advantage to build this new operating system for the industry”.

As a field engineer with Schlumberger (SLB), one of the world’s largest oilfield service companies, Sood was the first woman in her district to join offshore rig operations in Abu Dhabi, where she worked 24-hour shifts in 120°F heat, often sleeping in her truck. “I’ve handled radioactive tools and explosives,” she said. “That gave me a front-row seat to envisioning tools to enable workers to make the best decisions no matter the challenges facing them”.

That experience became the foundation for Bolo AI. After earning her MBA from Harvard, Sood joined C3 AI where she led the oil and gas vertical and witnessed both the potential and the limitations of AI in energy. Meanwhile, Jain, a machine learning PhD and technical co-founder, brought over 15 years of applied AI experience across cybersecurity, finance, and automation.

Building AI That Works with Workers

Industrial operations generate enormous amounts of data: sensor readings, SCADA logs, design documents, among others. Yet much of that information is buried in disconnected systems, long PDF reports, and unread dashboards. “A delay in a project might be buried in an 80-page weekly report,” Sood said. “You might miss that small detail, and now the project is delayed”.

Bolo AI is tackling that with its “AI Control Tower” for capital projects: a hyper-intelligent assistant that works like a project manager, never missing a buried risk. It reads contracts, connects shipping delays to schedule slippage, and spots early signals in unstructured data. Drilling engineers, for instance, will receive real-time hazard alerts from well logs. 

“Traditional project tools are built for plans, not change,” the company wrote in a recent analysis. “A true AI Control Tower thinks across your data. It reads fine print, picks up signals, and connects them before they hit your budget or timeline.”

Bolo’s platform integrates with tools like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and enterprise systems like SAP and Databricks, and is reportedly already being piloted with a Fortune 500 industrial giant and the largest oil refinery in the U.S.

The Strategic Stakes

Bolo is looking to offer operational agility and safety in a sector that still runs on outdated infrastructure. In oil and gas, every hour of unplanned downtime can cost upwards of $2 million. Missed safety protocols can have far worse consequences. Sood notes that frontline workers are increasingly asked to do more with less, often without access to critical institutional knowledge that resides in dense documents or aging experts.

Bolo wants to address that by transforming AI into a co-pilot that “understands the vocabulary and nuance” of energy workflows, with AI agents that are trained on more than 100 curated data sources and designed around actual workflows from decades of industrial knowledge.

And while early-stage, Bolo’s go-to-market strategy appears pragmatic. “Start small, measure success metrics, and work iteratively,” Sood wrote after participating in Oil & Gas Automation Week. Her conversations with leaders at Shell, Chevron, and Aramco revealed a common theme: they want to see results from AI.

A System of Action for a $20 Trillion Sector

Heavy industry represents a $20 trillion global sector, yet it has long been underserved by software. In that vacuum, Bolo AI positions itself as a daily-use platform for the people who keep infrastructure running, often in extreme conditions.

“They’re building the infrastructure to make critical operations in heavy industries more intelligent and efficient,” said Helen Min of True Ventures. “This is a team that understands the customer deeply and has the technical skill to deliver”.