Swedish fund Creandum has led the seed round for the artificial intelligence-based platform Maisa. The Spanish firm has closed this round with funding of $25 million, the highest amount raised to date in Spain in a seed round. Other investors have participated along with Creandum, such as Forgepoint Capital, which is joining the project, and NFX and Village Global, which had previously backed the project.

Creandum explained its decision thus, “We believe that David Villalón, Manuel Romero and the team have built something that really changes the rules of the game. It is already live with global banks and is recognised by Gartner as a leading AI vendor. This is just the beginning.”

A tangible impact
The difference that the Swedish fund has seen in this project is based on the fact that most enterprise AI projects get stuck in the pilot phase, “Nearly nine out of 10 AI applications do not make it past the proof-of-concept stage, and over 80% of large enterprises do not see a tangible impact on their business profits through the use of generative AI”.

Instead, they note, “Maisa is solving one of the most complex challenges posed by AI: making it reliable and secure for use in crucial business operations”. The proposal is based on agent-based process automation, which combines the reliability of robotic process automation with the adaptability of generative AI. This idea poses one of the biggest challenges facing enterprise software closers: finally delivering on the promise of AI at scale.

Complex business processes
According to Creandum, CEO David Villalón and CSO Manuel Romero are “two exceptional leaders in applied AI” who “saw first-hand that existing AI tools were not reliable for complex, multi-step business processes. Therefore, instead of creating another chatbot, they reinvented AI automation from scratch using operating system architecture principles.”

Maisa explained, “Our digital workers are already transforming operations at global banks, motor vehicle manufacturers and energy companies, automating everything from compliance controls to supply chain monitoring. We are scaling up rapidly in Europe and North America.”

^{Photo: Creandum}