I’m excited to share that Forgepoint Capital International is investing in Maisa’s $25M Seed funding round led by Creandum, with participation from existing investors NfX and Village Global. We are thrilled to partner with the team at Maisa, innovators in trustworthy agentic AI transforming business process automation (BPA) at enterprise scale. 

Untapped process automations and the unfulfilled potential of agentic AI 

BPA and knowledge work automation are ripe for disruption. Existing BPA is cumbersome and costly, requiring substantial human intervention to manually define processes and encode automations.  

Recent advancements in agentic AI have driven a surge of interest in AI-enabled BPA. However, there is far more hype and ‘AI washing’ than substance in the market. Buyers are more likely to see products like AI assistants, RPA tools, and chatbots branded as agentic AI than substantial agentic capabilities.  

Enterprise AI adoption also remains sluggish. Trust in AI is a core issue, with persistent concerns around AI hallucinations and output explainability. Many businesses struggle to equip their workforce with the necessary expertise and skills to support AI implementations.  

These intersecting challenges have resulted in a dearth of AI-driven automation. Many businesses eschew BPA in favor of human-centered business process outsourcing (BPO), while those that pursue AI automation find limited success: 88% of AI pilot projects fail to progress beyond a proof-of concept.  

Maisa: Flexible and trustworthy AI agents unlocking BPA at scale 

Maisa enables AI automation for complex business tasks with ‘digital workers,’ AI agents that eliminate BPA cost barriers, address AI explainability and trust challenges, and alleviate AI expertise requirements.  

Maisa’s digital workers are hallucination-resistant, auditable, and enterprise-ready. Knowledge workers without IT, coding, or AI expertise can develop and deploy digital workers thanks to Maisa’s Human Augmented LLM Processing (HALP) approach, a novel framework in which AI agents learn through interactions with humans. Employees simply use natural language commands to train digital workers for specific automation use cases. This dramatically reduces training time, increases trust, and reduces costs to unlock BPA at scale. 

Maisa’s innovative architecture, the Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU), acts as a reasoning engine built for cognitive work. The KPU enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) to manage complex processes and orchestrate computational calculations, memory, data flows, and external tools- a critical capability in complex enterprise environments. 

Tangible trust from day one 

At Forgepoint, we believe AI will open the door to previously impractical or impossible process automations, particularly in large enterprises. Agentic AI is particularly interesting to us given its potential to redefine enterprise BPA.  

Successfully deploying AI agents is an exercise in trust- in AI implementations, reasoning, and outcomes. As investors, we look for AI companies that prioritize trust while developing differentiated technologies, validated approaches, and strong teams with the vision to scale globally. That’s precisely what Maisa brings to the table.  

Maisa has unique and valuable technology with trust at the core of its products and operations, led by a driven and proven team of AI experts- a rare combination of advantages. Maisa’s KPU not only enables agentic AI-driven automations; it delivers a highly traceable and auditable record of agent logic, execution, and workflows to reduce hallucinations, ensure verifiable outcomes, and build customer trust.  

This winning approach can be traced to Maisa’s exceptional co-founders, CEO David Villalon and Chief Scientific Officer Manu Romero. We first met David in 2023 prior to Maisa’s founding, while he was the Chief AI officer at AI infrastructure firm Clibrain AI. When David and Manu- the former Chief Scientific Officer at Clibrain AI- launched Maisa in early 2024, we immediately saw the potential in their complementary track records, with David’s product leadership acumen and Manu’s software engineering expertise. 

Since then, Maisa has made exceptional progress in a remarkably short amount of time. Following a $5M pre-seed funding round, the Maisa team has quickly scaled to meet emerging enterprise customer needs around AI governance and trust.  

Maisa’s momentum hasn’t gone unnoticed: the company was recently featured in Gartner’s AI Hype Cycle and Future of Work Hype cycle reports. Maisa’s customers- large global businesses across financial services, banking, energy, and automotives- are finding immense value in Maisa’s adaptable AI-enabled automations. Enterprises plan to use Maisa’s digital workers to unlock new automations including supply chain monitoring, invoice processing, fraud detection, and regulatory monitoring.  

Automating knowledge work and closing the AI adoption gap 

As we look ahead, we are confident that Maisa can disrupt enterprise BPA and play a significant role in the $7B+ Agentic Process Automation (APA) market, expected to grow to $41B+ by 2030, with its novel approach to agentic AI reliability, accountability, and accessibility. The company has the potential to bridge the enterprise AI adoption gap, unlock a massive number of untapped automations, and lay the foundation for responsible AI governance, robust data management, and transparent decision-making across the enterprise. 

We look forward to working alongside David, Manu, and the Maisa team as they innovate AI agents to redefine complex process automations.