A staggering 95% of generative AI pilots at corporations are failing, based on a current report revealed by MIT’s NANDA initiative. However fairly than giving up on the know-how altogether, essentially the most superior organizations are experimenting with agentic AI techniques that may be taught and be supervised.
That’s the place Maisa AI is available in. The year-old startup has constructed its whole strategy across the premise that enterprise automation requires accountable AI brokers, not opaque black containers. With a brand new, $25 million seed spherical led by European VC agency Creandum, it has now launched Maisa Studio, a model-agnostic self-serve platform that helps customers deploy digital staff that may be skilled with pure language.
Whereas which may sound acquainted — paying homage to so-called vibe coding platforms like Cursor and the Creandum-backed Lovable — Maisa argues that its strategy is basically completely different. “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,” Maisa CEO David Villalón instructed TechCrunch.
The principal architect behind this course of is Maisa’s co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Manuel Romero, who had beforehand labored with Villalón at Spanish AI startup Clibrain. In 2024, the duo teamed as much as construct an answer to hallucinations after seeing firsthand that “you could not rely on AI,” Villalón stated.
The pair isn’t skeptical about AI, however they assume it received’t be possible for people to evaluate “three months of work done in five minutes.” To handle this, Maisa employs a system referred to as HALP, standing for Human-Augmented LLM Processing. This tradition methodology works like college students on the blackboard — it asks customers about their wants whereas the digital staff define every step they are going to observe.
The startup additionally developed the Information Processing Unit (KPU), a deterministic system designed to restrict hallucinations. Whereas Maisa began out from this technical problem fairly than a use case, it quickly discovered that its wager on trustworthiness and accountability resonated with corporations hoping to use AI to crucial duties. As an illustration, purchasers that presently use Maisa in manufacturing embrace a big financial institution, in addition to corporations within the automobile manufacturing and power sectors.
By serving these enterprise purchasers, Maisa hopes to place itself as a extra superior type of robotic course of automation (RPA) that unlocks productiveness good points with out requiring corporations to depend on inflexible predefined guidelines or in depth handbook programming. To fulfill their wants, the startup additionally gives them both deployment in its safe cloud or by on-premise deployment.
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This enterprise-first strategy means Maisa’s buyer base remains to be very small in comparison with the thousands and thousands flocking to freemium vibe-coding platforms. However as these platforms are actually exploring how one can win enterprise clients, Maisa is transferring in the wrong way with Maisa Studio, which is designed to develop its buyer funnel and ease adoption.
The startup additionally plans to increase with present clients which have operations in a number of international locations. With twin headquarters in Valencia and San Francisco, Maisa itself already has a foothold within the U.S., as mirrored in its cap desk; its $5 million pre-seed spherical final December was led by the San Francisco-based enterprise corporations NFX and Village World.
As well as, TechCrunch realized solely that U.S. agency Forgepoint Capital Worldwide participated on this new spherical by way of its European three way partnership with Spanish financial institution Banco Santander, highlighting its attraction for regulated sectors.
Specializing in complicated use circumstances demanding accountability from non-technical customers might be a differentiator for Maisa, whose opponents embrace CrewAI and lots of different AI-powered, business-focused workflow automation merchandise. In a LinkedIn submit, Villalón highlighted this “AI framework gold rush,” warning that the “quick start” turns into an extended nightmare whenever you want reliability, auditability, or the flexibility to repair what went incorrect.”
Doubling down on its objective to assist AI scale, Maisa plans to make use of its funding to develop from 35 to as many as 65 folks by the primary quarter of 2026 so as to meet demand. Beginning within the final quarter of this 12 months, the startup anticipates speedy progress because it begins serving its ready listing. “We are going to show the market that there is a company that is delivering what has been promised, and that it’s working,” Villalón stated.
