Retrofuturist Maisa AI is a promising new startup focused on the full potential of generative artificial intelligence. It recently closed a $25 million seed funding round led by the European venture capital firm Creandum. This larger investment follows the company’s strong initial pre-seed round. By December 2024, they had locked down $5 million with the help of San Francisco–centric venture capital firms NFX and Village Global.
The company was co-founded by David Villalón and Maisa. Home to headquarters in both Valencia and San Francisco, they’ve made a strong impact on the American market, seen clearly by their often mentioned diverse cap table. Maisa’s goal is to address the all-too-common 95% failure rate of enterprise AI implementations. It’s time for it to lead the way in creating a more dependable, ideal solution for companies looking to automate.
Maisa AI is a mission-driven company, dedicated to building accountable AI agents. This method prevents the development of opaque black boxes which can generate erratic outcomes. Villalón advocates for increased transparency with whatever AI may be. He added, “Rather than using AI to generate the response, we use it to discover the process that gets to the response — what we refer to as ‘chain-of-work.’” This huge change is meant to address harms development teams often experience when releasing AI systems.
The 7-year-old startup’s flagship product, Maisa Studio, is a visually intuitive, robust self-serve platform. It provides an environment for users to deploy digital workers that can be quickly trained via simple, natural language commands. This unique government-developed tool is an incredibly powerful resource to help businesses grow and thrive. It empowers them to design unique automation workflows that fit their unique requirements. Maisa has some pretty great facility. Its potential user base still lags far behind more established platforms that offer freemium coding alternatives.
Maisa is getting ready to attack its waiting list. To the company, their anticipated triple-digit growth is a reflection of their commitment to providing traceable AI decisions. Reliability is an incredibly important factor for any AI applications that Villalón emphasized to us. He cautions that “quick start” solutions easily become long-term burdens when companies rely on uniformity and auditability.
He further asserts that Maisa aims to demonstrate its value to the market: “We are going to show the market that there is a company that is delivering what has been promised, and that it’s working.” This decision pours further fuel on Maisa’s mission to prove the doubters wrong about what AI can do.
The startup’s emphasis on accountability and transparency meets an increasing enterprise demand for trustworthy automation, which is apparent in the startup’s customer base. Organizations are moving quickly to adopt AI technology. More than ever, particularly with this ever-growing trend, there is a need for proven systems and practices that produce on-demand, verifiable results.