Maisa Raises $25M to Tackle Enterprise Automation’s 95% Breakdown Rate

Enterprise automation has reached a decisive juncture. A study from MIT’s NANDA initiative recently reported that 95 percent of automation pilots stall before reaching meaningful production use. The figure shows a striking pattern: projects launch with great enthusiasm but lose traction when organizations attempt to implement them into daily operations. The recent announcement that Maisa, a Valencia- and San Francisco–based startup, secured $25 million in seed funding stands out as a test case for how companies are attempting to alter this pattern.

Rethinking Automation Workflows

Founded in 2024, Maisa has built its model on the idea that enterprises require accountable digital workers, not black-box systems. Its flagship product, Maisa Studio, enables organizations to design what the company calls a “chain of work.” Instead of focusing on single responses, these digital workers outline each step of a process before execution, creating visibility for review and correction.

Chief Executive David Villalón explained the rationale in an interview: “Instead of using technology to build the responses, we use it to build the process that needs to be executed to get to the response”. By foregrounding the process rather than the outcome, Maisa positions itself closer to traditional workflow management, but with greater flexibility.

Villalón and co-founder Manuel Romero, the company’s Chief Scientific Officer, previously worked at Spanish startup Clibrain. There they observed persistent errors in text-generation projects and concluded that enterprises needed tools to verify steps before approving final results and that is where this idea emerge. Their experience shaped the decision to design a model where humans remain central, guiding and checking digital workers throughout.