Maisa AI, a year-old startup focused on enterprise automation, has secured a $25 million seed round led by Creandum and launched Maisa Studio, a model-agnostic self-serve platform that enables companies to train and deploy digital workers using natural language. The announcement comes amid findings from MIT’s NANDA initiative that 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing, pushing advanced organizations to explore agentic AI systems that are supervised and accountable rather than opaque black boxes.
Unlike coding assistants or vibe-coding platforms such as Cursor and Lovable, Maisa positions itself differently. “Instead of using AI to build the responses, we use AI to build the process that needs to be executed to get to the response — what we call ‘chain-of-work,’” CEO David Villalón told TechCrunch. The approach stems from a technical challenge co-founders Villalón and Chief Scientific Officer Manuel Romero encountered at their previous startup, Clibrain, where they realized “you could not rely on AI” without trust and verifiability.
To tackle issues like hallucinations, Maisa developed HALP — Human-Augmented LLM Processing — which operates like students explaining work on a blackboard, showing step-by-step reasoning while gathering user input. The company also created the Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU), a deterministic system designed to constrain hallucinations and ensure reliability. These innovations have already attracted enterprise clients in banking, automotive, and energy sectors.
Maisa’s model is designed as a next-generation version of robotic process automation (RPA), enabling productivity without rigid rules or heavy manual coding. Customers can choose deployment through Maisa’s secure cloud or on-premises, catering to organizations with strict compliance needs.
While Maisa’s customer base remains small compared to mass-market AI platforms, its enterprise-first strategy is starting to resonate. Existing clients with multinational operations are expected to scale usage, while Maisa Studio is aimed at broadening adoption. The company operates out of dual headquarters in Valencia and San Francisco and previously raised a $5 million pre-seed led by NFX and Village Global. The latest round also included participation from Forgepoint Capital International via its joint venture with Banco Santander, signaling strong interest from regulated industries.
Looking ahead, Maisa plans to expand its team from 35 to around 65 employees by early 2026. Villalón emphasized the startup’s ambition: “We are going to show the market that there is a company that is delivering what has been promised, and that it’s working.”
