Maisa, a rapidly growing player in agentic AI, has secured $25 million in seed funding to accelerate the deployment of its hallucination-resistant digital workers across regulated industries. Creandum led the round with participation from Forgepoint Capital International via its joint venture with Banco Santander. Returning investors NFX and Village Global also joined, doubling down on their December 2024 pre-seed investment.
This funding round also coincides with the launch of Maisa Studio, a no-code platform that enables “citizen developers”—non-technical business users—to create and deploy AI agents using natural language alone.
Studio is already being piloted by global banks, automakers, and energy firms to automate complex, compliance-sensitive workflows. The platform’s digital workers require no datasets or developer input, and instead learn through a proprietary method called HALP (human-augmented LLM processing). Every action is logged in Maisa’s “Chain-of-Work,” an auditable trail of logic and execution designed to eliminate hallucinations and ensure enterprise-grade reliability.
Founded in 2024 by CEO David Villalón and CSO Manuel Romero, Maisa has quickly gained recognition. Romero, a top HuggingFace contributor, has published over 700 open-source models with 15 million monthly downloads. Last month, Gartner named Maisa alongside Google and Amazon in its Hype Cycle for AI and Future of Work—marking the first time a Spanish startup appeared in the report.
Maisa’s model-agnostic system transforms general-purpose LLMs into specialized, traceable agents. It runs on a proprietary reasoning engine called the Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU), which executes tasks through step-by-step computation rather than probabilistic inference.
Early deployments of Studio underscore its potential for the enterprise. A global investment bank now uses Maisa agents to automate media screening and reputational risk analysis, producing audit-ready summaries in minutes. A financial services firm has replaced manual transaction reconciliation with Studio, achieving a 10x productivity boost and eliminating 99% of false positives—without writing a single line of code.
Studio integrates with over 450 third-party systems and connects to both documented and custom APIs. Automations can be triggered via web, email, API, or webhook, and updated through the same conversational interface used to create them.
As enterprise AI adoption continues to stall—MIT, IDC, and BCG report failure rates as high as 95%—Maisa positions itself as a scalable, trustworthy alternative. With its latest funding and product launch, the company aims to redefine how businesses deploy AI at scale.
How the funding will be used: The funding will fuel hiring across AI R&D, engineering, and customer success, while expanding Maisa’s footprint in Europe and North America.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
David Villalón, co-founder and CEO of Maisa
“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.”
Peter Specht, General Partner from Creandum
“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.”
Alberto Yepez, from Forgepoint Capital International
