South African AI startup Cerebrium raises R150 million to scale its innovative platform

Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure platform founded in Cape Town, has announced a successful $8.5 million (R151.35m) seed funding 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,” a statement from Cerebrium said Tuesday.

The company and its AI platform have pioneered technical advancements that enable teams to build and scale multimodal AI applications without the traditional complexity or cost. Founded in Cape Town 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, said: “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 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,” said Louis.

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