Samaya AI just pulled in $43.5M in a Series A led by NEA, and if that reads like just another funding line item, slow down. This one hums a different tune. In a market addicted to generic AI wrappers, Samaya AI is building something sharper, something that actually understands the weight of a balance sheet and the ripple of a rate hike.
Founded in 2022, Samaya AI was not born in a brainstorm about vibes. Maithra Raghu and Fabio Petroni came out of serious AI research environments with a clear thesis: finance does not need louder models, it needs smarter ones. In a world where a missed variable can cost $100M+, precision is not a feature. It is oxygen.
Maithra Raghu, Co-founder and CEO, brings Google Brain discipline and a Cornell machine learning backbone into the arena. Fabio Petroni, Co-founder, complements that with deep research firepower. Together, they are not chasing trend cycles. They are engineering conviction into code, aimed directly at institutional investors who do not tolerate hallucinations.
NEA led the $43.5M Series A, joined by Eric Schmidt, Yann LeCun, David Siegel, and Marty Chavez. That is not casual capital. That is a room full of people who understand both silicon and sovereign risk. When operators and architects of modern tech and finance align behind a vertical AI company, the subtext is clear: this is infrastructure thinking, not surface gloss.
Samaya AI builds Expert AI Agents for financial services. Not a chatbot that paraphrases earnings calls, but systems designed to retrieve, contextualize, and reason across massive financial datasets. Research reports, pitch decks, macro policy shifts, sector shocks. The kind of inputs that usually require 3 analysts, 2 screens, and a pot of coffee strong enough to power a data center.
Their Causal World Models move the conversation from What happened to What happens next if this variable moves 2%? In a $35T financial services market suffocating under information density, that shift is everything. It is the difference between summarizing yesterday and positioning for tomorrow.
In February 2026, Samaya AI launched its Agent Control Plane and announced new investment from NVentures and Databricks Ventures. Personalized, long-running agents that embed institutional context and operate over extended horizons. Not just answers, but memory. Not just output, but evolving intelligence aligned to how a firm actually thinks.
TIME recognized Maithra Raghu on the TIME100 AI list in 2025, and analysts at top Wall Street firms are already using Samaya AI to generate research and pressure-test macro scenarios. No flashy client parade. Just quiet adoption where billions move on nuance.
The lesson for founders is not subtle. Vertical depth compounds. Domain obsession wins. Capital chases clarity. And Samaya AI is proving that in high-stakes markets, intelligence is not about saying more. It is about knowing exactly what matters when everything else is noise.
