Trissino Raises $1.2M to Scale Steve AI, an Autonomous Competitive Intelligence Agent Built for a Market Where Moats Are Harder Than Ever to Build

AI has made markets move faster than ever. Competitors ship products and launch campaigns in a fraction of the time they once needed, and companies that don’t track those moves risk falling behind. San Francisco-based Trissino has closed new funding to expand Steve AI, its AI-native competitive intelligence agent, which already has paying customers in six countries.

San Francisco-based Trissino (Techstars 2025) has raised $1.2M to date to build and scale Steve AI, an autonomous, AI-native competitive intelligence agent for B2B software companies.

Trissino will use the funding to continue developing the product and to strengthen its go-to-market efforts.

Until now, competitive intelligence has been a luxury reserved for large enterprises. Traditional tools come with big budgets and require dedicated competitive researchers to manage them. But as competitive pressure intensifies, companies of every size need this insight. Steve AI is built to run autonomously, so lean marketing teams at small and mid-sized businesses can put it to work right away. Many of Trissino’s current customers are companies that had never been able to afford competitive intelligence before.

Trissino has also identified a newer competitor that many vendors overlook. For B2B software companies, the competition is no longer limited to other vendors, because AI has made it easier for buyers to consider building in-house. Steve AI includes a dedicated build-vs-buy analysis feature. When a prospect weighs building their own solution, Steve AI maps out where the vendor’s product is stronger and more complete than an in-house build, helping sales teams make an accurate and compelling case.

Steve AI stands apart in three ways. It offers broad data coverage, keeps hallucination to a minimum, and is designed to learn from a company’s internal context. Beyond public sources like competitor websites, Steve AI draws on a company’s own sales calls, emails, and internal documents. External intelligence only becomes meaningful when it’s combined with internal context, and the same competitor move can mean very different things to two different companies. By learning from both, Steve AI produces the competitive intelligence most likely to raise win rates against each competitor and tells marketing and sales teams exactly what to do next, in a format they can act on immediately.

Every insight Steve AI delivers is backed by multiple sources. When it can’t find an answer, it doesn’t make one up. Instead, it leaves the field blank and asks the marketer to fill in the gap. This discipline keeps the risk of hallucination to a minimum.

Trissino was founded in San Francisco in 2024 by CEO Taka Morinaga, formerly a marketer at Amazon, and CTO Gagan Tomar, formerly a software engineer at Apple. The idea came from Taka’s time at Amazon, where he noticed that the question clients asked most often in weekly meetings was what their competitors were doing. He became convinced that companies needed a far better way to get competitive insight, and Trissino was born.

“Competitive intelligence has long been an underrated category, and as a result it hasn’t seen meaningful innovation in a decade,” said CEO Taka Morinaga. “That’s about to change. Companies are using AI to dramatically accelerate how fast they build products and bring them to market, and that makes competitive intelligence more critical than ever. We want to give these companies the weapons they need to win in their markets.”

“Taka leads a bold new generation of Japanese founders building globally from day one out of San Francisco. Paired with global tech talent like Gagan, their relentless grit and work ethic, whether fundraising from top angels or taking calls at 3 a.m., always impress me. Steve AI targets a massive yet specific market in competitive intelligence unlike generic foundational models, and Techstars is thrilled to support Trissino as they scale worldwide,” said Yuki Shirato, Managing Director of Techstars Tokyo.

Trissino has completed SOC 2 certification and is expanding into the enterprise market. With full multilingual support already in place, the company is accelerating its global expansion, led by the U.S. market.

To learn more, visit hiresteve.ai.