Rising star of agentic AI delivering trustworthy ‘digital workers’ raises $25M from Creandum and Forgepoint

Maisa, a dual US/Europe-headquartered company, has announced a $25 million seed investment led by Creandum, with participation from Forgepoint Capital International through its European joint venture with Banco Santander. NFX and Village Global, who invested $5 million in the company's pre-seed round last December, also participated in this funding round.

The company was founded in 2024 by CEO David Villalón, formerly Chief AI Officer at Clibrain, and CSO Manuel Romero, a top HuggingFace contributor with over 700 open-source models. The funding will support expansion across AI research, engineering, sales, and customer success in Europe and North America.

Maisa Studio Platform Launch

Alongside the fundraise, Maisa unveiled Maisa Studio, an agentic process automation platform designed for "citizen developers"—business experts without IT backgrounds. The platform allows non-technical staff to deploy powerful, fully auditable AI digital workers using natural language commands.

The platform is currently being piloted at global financial institutions, car manufacturers, and energy companies to automate complex, compliance-sensitive workflows. According to the company, digital workers learn on the job by doing, through a method Maisa calls "HALP" (human-augmented LLM processing).

Real-World Deployment Success

Maisa has demonstrated operational success with major clients:

• A global investment bank replaced manual media screening with Maisa digital workers that extract facts from news articles and assess reputational risk

• A large financial services firm automated transaction reconciliation, filtering out 99% of false positives and achieving 10x productivity improvement per person with no engineering work required

Addressing Enterprise AI Challenges

Recent industry data underscores the problems Maisa addresses. MIT's NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI pilots are failing and delivering little measurable impact on P&L. Additionally, IDC research shows 88% of AI pilots fail to reach production, and BCG found only 22% of companies have advanced AI beyond proof-of-concept stage.

Maisa eliminates barriers by providing a model-agnostic system built on its proprietary Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU) reasoning engine. The platform records every action in what the company calls Chain-of-Work—a transparent, auditable record reducing hallucinations and ensuring traceable decision-making.

Leadership Perspectives

"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." — David Villalón, co-founder and CEO

"Maisa is solving one of the toughest challenges in AI: making it reliable and safe to use in mission-critical business operations." — Peter Specht, General Partner, Creandum

"The company's early success demonstrates there's real market pull for AI done the right way and Studio will make it easy for anyone to use digital workers quickly." — Alberto Yepez, Forgepoint Capital International

Platform Integration and Recognition

Studio integrates with over 450 third-party systems and connects to any documented API. The platform was recently named by Gartner alongside Google and Amazon as a leading AI agent vendor—marking the first time a Spanish startup appeared in one of Gartner's influential Hype Cycle reports.