A staggering 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing, according to a recent report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative. But rather than giving up on the technology altogether, the most advanced organizations are experimenting with agentic AI systems that can learn and be supervised.
That’s where Maisa AI comes in. The year-old startup has built its entire approach around the premise that enterprise automation requires accountable AI agents, not opaque black boxes. With a new, $25 million seed round led by European VC firm Creandum, it has now launched Maisa Studio, a model-agnostic self-serve platform that helps users deploy digital workers that can be trained with natural language.
While that might sound familiar — reminiscent of so-called vibe coding platforms like Cursor and the Creandum-backed Lovable — Maisa argues that its approach is fundamentally 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 told TechCrunch.
The principal architect behind this process is Maisa’s co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Manuel Romero, who had previously worked with Villalón at Spanish AI startup Clibrain. In 2024, the duo teamed up to build a solution to hallucinations after seeing firsthand that “you could not rely on AI,” Villalón said.
The pair isn’t skeptical about AI, but they think it won’t be feasible for humans to review “three months of work done in five minutes.” To address this, Maisa employs a system called HALP, standing for Human-Augmented LLM Processing. This custom method works like students at the blackboard — it asks users about their needs while the digital workers outline each step they will follow.
Image Credits:Maisa AI
The startup also developed the Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU), a deterministic system designed to limit hallucinations. While Maisa started out from this technical challenge rather than a use case, it soon found that its bet on trustworthiness and accountability resonated with companie …
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