South African AI Startup Cerebrium Raises $8.5M Seed Funding

Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure startup founded in Cape Town and now headquartered in New York City, has raised $8.5 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund, with participation from Y Combinator and Authentic Ventures. The platform enables engineering teams to build, deploy, and scale multimodal AI applications that process diverse data types such as text, images, audio, and video in real-time, supporting use cases including voice AI, real-time avatars, and healthcare. Cerebrium's serverless infrastructure dynamically spins up CPU and GPU resources on demand, allowing clients to pay only for actual compute time used, which is particularly cost-effective for volatile, high-performance workloads. The funding will be used to expand the engineering team, enhance platform features, and meet rising enterprise demand, with clients including Tavus, Deepgram, and Vapi already generating millions in annual recurring revenue. Co-founders Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin developed the platform to address challenges they faced building AI-driven products, aiming to simplify AI product development and reduce operational overhead. This seed round marks a significant milestone for the South African tech ecosystem, highlighting growing global investor confidence in African AI startups.