CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 23, 2026 — Ekai announced a $1.7 million pre-seed funding round led by Misneach with participation from C10 Labs. The company said the funding will accelerate product development, scale go-to-market operations and deepen platform integrations.
The round comes as enterprises increasingly attribute AI failures inside businesses not to the models but to missing business context. Ekai argues much of the industry attempts to infer meaning by reverse-engineering dashboards, query history or dbt projects rather than asking the people who actually know. “Reverse-engineering from existing BI dashboards, query history, your dbt project, is asking the exhaust pipe what the engine was thinking,” said Moatassim (Mo) Aidrus, co-founder and CEO of Ekai. “This is useful for documenting what you have, but it does nothing for what you need next.”
Ekai’s forward-engineering approach
Ekai said its product is built around a sequence it calls forward-engineering: go to domain experts who know what the data means, treat their answers as ground truth, and only then translate that knowledge into machine-readable business logic, transformation code and validation rules. The company reconciles every generated artifact against the warehouse before it is allowed to ship, framing the platform as an AI augmentation layer where human experts drive the semantic model and AI handles translation into production infrastructure.
Co-founder and Chief AI Officer Hussnain Ahmed emphasized the need to capture business meaning from people, not from public models: “Foundation models were trained on the public internet, not on your enterprise data. They know the term active user; they have no idea what it means in your company or where it lives in your data warehouse. No model ships with that knowledge,” he said. “It has to be captured from the people who define the business, built and proven in the data, and owned by someone with their name on it. With Ekai, nothing ships unchecked.”
Funding, benchmarks and integrations
Ekai released benchmark figures from early engagements showing semantic modeling that has historically taken teams three to six months completed by Ekai’s process in as little as six hours, at a fraction of the cost. The company framed the result as a verification story: the speed comes from not having to guess, correct and re-guess what the data means.
Mark Coffey, co-founder and Managing Partner at Misneach, pointed to the founders’ experience: “Mo and his co-founders, Hussnain and Tero Miikki, each have spent over two decades in leadership roles at Accenture, Microsoft and UPM, which put them in a room with chief technology and data officers trying to get AI into production. They aren’t guessing at the problem Ekai solves; they watched it go unsolved from the other side of the table. Ekai closes that gap in days rather than months, without the data ever leaving the company, and what a company gets back from its AI goes from unreliable to the exact answers the business needs to run on.”
Patricia Geli, co-founder and Managing Partner of C10 Labs, said: “Ekai is the first platform that puts domain experts directly in charge of defining that business meaning with full governance, speed, and accuracy. We are proud to back Ekai in this pre-seed round as they set a new standard for AI-ready enterprise data pipelines.”
Ekai said its AI workflows that turn raw warehouse data into secure, governed, AI-ready business data are available now to enterprise customers on Snowflake (with a listing on Snowflake’s marketplace), Databricks, BigQuery, Postgres, ClickHouse, DuckDB, RedShift and Azure Synapse. The company runs inside a customer’s own cloud; data is read in place and never copied out or retained. Both the data and Ekai remain under the customer’s control, the company said.
About Misneach
Misneach is a Boston-based Founder Propulsion Platform backing early-stage founders from formation through seed. The firm says capital is the entry point and that it offers embedded AI infrastructure and execution leverage as part of its support.
About Ekai
Ekai turns analytical data and expert knowledge into business context for AI. The company captures business meaning directly from the people who run the business, verifies it against the underlying data, and publishes governed, AI-ready models with an accountable author so data products ship in days, not months.
