Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure platform founded in Cape Town, is proud to announce an $8.5 million seed round, led by Gradient, Google’s AI venture fund, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angel investors and operators. It’s a remarkable milestone for South African tech, as local founders secure backing from one of the most influential AI investors in the world.
The company and its AI platform are responsible for pioneering technical advancements that enable teams to build and scale multimodal AI applications without the traditional complexity or cost. Founded in Cape Town, South Africa and now headquartered in New York City, this new funding will allow the team at Cerebrium to invest in new features and meet surging enterprise demand.
The company was founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, who previously served as CTO and Lead Engineer, respectively, at OneCart. OneCart was acquired by MassMart in 2021, serving as one of South Africa’s largest tech acquisitions at the time.
The duo founded Cerebrium after struggling to build their own AI-driven products. CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Louis, comments that: “Tooling was fragmented, there was an education gap between theory and production, the unit economics didn’t make sense, and development cycles took months. We built Cerebrium so engineers can focus on building AI products that users love with real business impact, instead of hiring an infrastructure team, racking up six-figure cloud bills or worrying about security and compliance.”
Cerebrium powers some of the most innovative companies pushing the boundaries in AI, including Tavus, Deepgram, Vapi, and many more. The platform is purposefully built for high-performance, real-time multimodal AI applications: voice agents, LLM fine-tuning, video models, and large-scale data analytics use cases. “We know that AI is changing the world, and we want Cerebrium, a South African founded company, to be the platform powering it,” concludes Louis.
Several industry stakeholders have been very vocal on Cerebrium’s success to date. Roey Paz-Priel, Machine Learning Engineer at Tavus, comments that: “We run a range of real-time audio and video models, and performance is everything. We tried a number of solutions, but Cerebrium consistently delivered the speed and reliability we needed without the overhead. Even as we’ve scaled rapidly and gone viral, they’ve kept up with our compute demands and delivered the stability we rely on. It has become a core part of our infrastructure.”
His sentiments are echoed by Eylul Kayin, Partner at Gradient: “What the Cerebrium team has pulled off with such a small group is incredible. They’re powering some of the most advanced AI voice and video applications at scale and we believe specialized infrastructure which scales elastically will be essential as real-time AI becomes core to customer experiences.”
While Cerebrium is known for its serverless GPU infrastructure, it also offers the ability to do batching, multi-region deployments, large scale data processing and much more. This enables teams to run compute-intensive workloads with minimal setup, scale elastically, and only pay for what they use, without the complexity of managing infrastructure while adhering to strict security and data residency requirements.
To learn more, visit cerebrium.ai.