Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure platform founded in Cape Town, has successfully raised $8.5 million in seed funding, led by Gradient, Google’s AI venture fund. The round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angel investors and operators. This funding milestone marks a significant achievement for South African tech, with local founders securing backing from one of the most influential AI investors in the world.

The company and its innovative AI platform are at the forefront of technical advancements that enable teams to develop and scale multimodal AI applications without the traditional complexity or costs typically associated with such efforts. Founded in Cape Town and now headquartered in New York City, Cerebrium plans to use this new funding to invest in new features and meet the increasing enterprise demand.

Cerebrium was founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, former CTO and Lead Engineer at OneCart, respectively. OneCart, a South African tech company, was acquired by MassMart in 2021, marking one of the largest tech acquisitions in South Africa at the time. After experiencing firsthand the challenges of building AI-driven products, Louis and Irwin launched Cerebrium.

CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Louis, comments: “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 built for high-performance, real-time multimodal AI applications such as voice agents, LLM fine-tuning, video models, and large-scale data analytics. “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 spoken highly of Cerebrium’s progress. Roey Paz-Priel, Machine Learning Engineer at Tavus, shares: “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.”

Eylul Kayin, Partner at Gradient, echoes this sentiment: “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 renowned for its serverless GPU infrastructure, it also offers capabilities for batching, multi-region deployments, large-scale data processing, and much more. This allows teams to run compute-intensive workloads with minimal setup, scale elastically, and only pay for what they use—all while maintaining strict security and data residency requirements.

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