Cerebrium, a South African-born AI infrastructure startup, has secured $8.5 million in seed funding to expand its engineering team and scale its platform for growing enterprise demand.
Founded in 2021 by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, former tech leads at South African grocery delivery firm OneCart, Cerebrium aims to simplify how developers build and run AI applications. The startup offers a serverless platform that helps companies deploy AI chatbots, voice assistants, and video tools without the hassle of managing complex infrastructure or high cloud costs.
The funding round was led by Gradient, Google’s AI venture fund, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and angel investors. Cerebrium’s technology supports real-time, multimodal AI, handling voice, video, and text simultaneously, which is becoming critical for next-generation AI products.
Michael Louis, CEO of Cerebrium, said, “We built Cerebrium so engineers can focus on building AI products that users love without worrying about infrastructure or security.” He added that the company is focused on performance, security, and regional compliance, including support for Africa, the US, and Europe.
Cerebrium’s platform is already used by companies like Tavus, Deepgram, and Vapi to run fast, scalable AI systems that respond instantly to users. Roey Paz-Priel, a machine learning engineer at Tavus, praised Cerebrium for delivering the speed and stability needed at scale.
With the global market for AI infrastructure expected to exceed $197 billion by 2030, Cerebrium aims to become the go-to platform for AI-native applications across industries, from sales to healthcare.
Cerebrium plans to use the funds to hire more engineers and improve its platform’s capabilities to meet rising worldwide demand.
