Maisa has secured a $25 million seed funding round, led by Creandum and supported by Forgepoint Capital, NFX, and Village Global.
The round marks the largest seed investment in Spain to date, reflecting the growth of the country's digital economy, which has doubled since 2020 and has been recognised as producing some of the most promising companies in Europe. Maisa is co-headquartered in Valencia, Spain, and San Francisco, United States.
This new round of funding follows Maisa's $5 million pre-seed round in December 2024, which also included NFX and Village Global, the latter backed by Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt. Both NFX and Village Global participated in this latest round as well.
Maisa Studio launch
In conjunction with its funding announcement, Maisa has launched Studio, an agentic process automation platform aimed at so-called 'citizen developers' - professionals with business expertise but without IT backgrounds. Studio enables these users to create and deploy AI-powered, fully auditable digital workers by issuing natural language commands, without the need for developers or prior datasets. Maisa reports that Studio is already being piloted at scale within global financial institutions, automotive manufacturers, and energy firms, automating multi-step processes that are both complex and sensitive to compliance requirements.
Maisa claims that its digital workers help address the persistent challenge of 'hallucinations' - inaccuracies or fabrications typical of many generative AI deployments - by providing traceable, logical, and transparent outputs. The platform trains digital workers through a process Maisa refers to as 'HALP' (human-augmented LLM processing), where agents learn on the job with oversight from humans to ensure reliability.
Recognition and market context
Maisa's trajectory was marked recently by its inclusion in two Gartner Hype Cycle reports, where it was named as a top global AI vendor alongside Google, Amazon and Salesforce. Maisa is the first Spanish company and one of only two European companies mentioned in these influential industry assessments.
Enterprise AI adoption has faced major obstacles. Research from MIT's NANDA initiative indicates that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable impact on profit and loss. Additional data from IDC finds that 88% of AI pilots do not reach production stages, while BCG concludes that just 22% of companies move beyond proof-of-concept to realise any tangible value. Furthermore, i4cp has reported that more than 70% of organisations encounter difficulties equipping their workforce with AI skills; Bain's research shows 44% of executives point to a lack of internal AI expertise as a barrier to implementation.
Leadership comments
David Villalón, co-founder and CEO of Maisa, said:
This investment is validation that AI in business must be built on trust. Our platform gives teams the power to use AI workers which not only perform with incredible accuracy and intelligence, but also explain and prove their logic, and document every step in the work process. It means users can scale AI at pace, do so safely and without the need for an entire development team to support.
Peter Specht, General Partner from Creandum, commented:
Maisa is solving one of the toughest challenges in AI: making it reliable and safe to use in mission-critical business operations. With a string of top global companies already using the technology and massive demand, we are extremely confident of seeing significant growth at scale.
Alberto Yepez, of Forgepoint Capital International, added:
Maisa's platform is purpose-built for compliance-conscious industries like finance, where decisions must be traceable and outcomes consistent. The company's early success demonstrates there's real market pull for AI done the right way and Studio, launched today, will make it easy for anyone in an organisation to use digital workers quickly and effectively.
Technology details
Maisa's agentic automation system is model-agnostic, designed to convert general-purpose large language models (LLMs) into safe, specialised AI agents suitable for operations spanning regulated industries. The system's underlying technology is based on Maisa's proprietary Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU), a reasoning engine that directs digital workers through logical, stepwise computation. All activity is recorded via a feature known as Chain-of-Work, producing a transparent and auditable execution record.
Maisa offers flexibility in deployment, with the option for its platform to be delivered as a secure cloud solution or privately, aiming to meet enterprise compliance requirements. Digital workers can be integrated into existing organisational processes and are equipped to interact with over 450 third-party systems out of the box, with further compatibility available for both documented and undocumented APIs. Automations can be triggered by web, email, API or webhook, and updated using the same conversational interface that created them. Studio also facilitates interactions with websites and legacy systems.
Enterprise use cases
The company cites several examples of Studio in operation within highly regulated environments. One global investment bank has replaced manual media screening with Maisa digital workers capable of extracting facts, assessing reputational risk, and generating audit-ready summaries rapidly. Another large financial services organisation has automated transaction checking and reconciliation, achieving a tenfold productivity increase per person and filtering out 99% of false positives, all without engineering work and requiring only three onboarding sessions.
Leadership and team
Maisa was founded in 2024 by Chief Executive Officer David Villalón and Chief Science Officer Manuel Romero. Villalón was previously Chief AI Officer at Clibrain and Director of Product at Voicemod, while Romero is recognised among the top global contributors to HuggingFace, offering more than 700 open-source models and 15 million monthly downloads.
The additional funding will be directed towards hiring new staff in AI research and development, engineering, sales and customer success, and towards expanding Maisa's market presence in both Europe and North America.
