Maisa, a dual-headquartered AI startup operating between Valencia, Spain and San Francisco, has closed a $25 million Series A funding round led by Creandum to advance its enterprise AI agent platform. The round included participation from Forgepoint Capital International through its European joint venture with Banco Santander, alongside return investors NFX and Village Global, which previously backed the company's $5 million pre-seed in December 2024.
The funding coincides with the launch of Maisa Studio, a platform designed to democratize AI agent creation for enterprise users without technical backgrounds. The system allows business domain experts to deploy what Maisa calls "digital workers" through natural language instructions, targeting complex, compliance-heavy workflows in sectors like financial services, manufacturing, and energy. Unlike traditional AI implementations that often require extensive developer support, Studio enables citizen developers to onboard AI agents with conversational commands.
At the core of Maisa's technology is the Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU), a proprietary reasoning engine that aims to address reliability concerns plaguing enterprise AI deployments. The system creates a "Chain-of-Work" audit trail that documents each step of the AI's decision-making process, designed to reduce hallucinations and provide the transparency required in regulated industries. This approach contrasts with probabilistic AI models by emphasizing logical, step-by-step computation for task execution.
The company's timing appears strategic given widespread challenges in enterprise AI adoption. Recent research from MIT's NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact, while IDC data shows 88% of AI pilots never reach production. Maisa positions itself as addressing these implementation barriers by eliminating the need for specialized AI expertise or extensive development resources.
Early enterprise deployments suggest traction in high-stakes environments. A global investment bank has operationalized Maisa's platform for automated media screening and reputational risk assessment, while a large financial services firm reports achieving 10x productivity improvements in transaction reconciliation with 99% false positive reduction. Notably, these implementations required no engineering work beyond initial onboarding sessions.
Founded in 2024 by CEO David Villalón, former Chief AI Officer at Clibrain, and CSO Manuel Romero, a prolific HuggingFace contributor with over 700 open-source models, Maisa has gained industry recognition despite its recent founding. The company was recently named alongside Google, Amazon, and Salesforce in Gartner's Hype Cycle reports as a leading AI agent vendor, marking the first inclusion of a Spanish startup in these influential industry analyses.
The platform's model-agnostic architecture integrates with over 450 third-party systems out of the box and supports both cloud and on-premises deployment to meet varying enterprise compliance requirements. This flexibility, combined with support for multiple trigger methods including API, webhook, and email activation, positions Maisa to address diverse enterprise automation needs as organizations seek reliable AI implementations beyond the proof-of-concept stage.
