Company · AI & Data

Cala

cala.ai ↗ ·Barcelona ·Pre-seed

Cala is a Barcelona-based startup building a verified knowledge graph and structured data API that gives AI agents and LLMs typed, source-traceable facts instead of raw web search results, covering domains like finance, legal, HR, and supply chain. Founded in 2026 by former Vilynx (acquired by Apple) co-founders Elisenda Bou-Balust and Issey Masuda Mora, it raised a €7M pre-seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, reportedly Spain's largest pre-seed round ever and Lightspeed's first investment in Spain.

Founded

2026

Founders

News

Rounds

Investors

SectorsAI & Data, Enterprise Software, Developer Tools Start-up MapAI & Data › AI data infrastructure

Profile updated 22 Jul 2026

Founders

Elisenda Bou-Balust

Co-Founder & CEO

Issey Masuda Mora

Co-Founder & CTO

Global models 5

Perplexity

United States · www.perplexity.ai ↗

Delivers verified, cited answers over web-scale data for AI-driven queries, the closest large-scale comparable to Cala's trusted-answer model.

$1.72BComparable

Glean

United States · www.glean.com ↗

Builds a structured knowledge layer and search/answer API that AI agents query for verified enterprise data, mirroring Cala's data-layer-for-agents approach.

$765MComparable

Exa

United States · exa.ai ↗

Provides a search API purpose-built for AI agents and LLMs to retrieve structured, high-quality web data, directly analogous to Cala's API model.

$352MComparable

Hebbia

United States · www.hebbia.com ↗

Turns unstructured data into verified, structured answers for AI agents in finance and enterprise workflows, similar to Cala's vertical data offering.

$161MComparable

Bright Data

Israel · brightdata.com ↗

Supplies structured, cleaned public web data via API for AI and LLM training/agent use, matching Cala's public-data-to-structured-facts pipeline.

$34MComparable

Investors 4

Lightspeed Venture Partners

lsvp.com ↗

Investor United States

Masia

www.masia.vc

Investor Spain

Funding rounds 1

Pre-seed · €7M

Cala emerged from stealth with a €7 million pre-seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners — reported as Lightspeed's first investment in…

2026-05-11

News & media 4

Published	Article
2026-06-03	Building the verified knowledge graph: Your AI agents need better data ↗ The Infinite Loop
2026-05-18	Dealflow.es #513: Embat raised €30M. Lightspeed makes 1st investment in Spain (Cala). Spain tech report 2026. ↗ Dealflow.es
2026-05-02	Beyond Lovable and Mistral: 21 European startups to watch ↗ TechCrunch
2025-07-05	The Women building The Future of AI ↗ Surf the Wave (Substack)