Cape Town-founded AI infrastructure startup Cerebrium has raised $8.5 million (R151.35 million) in seed funding, led by Gradient, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several angel investors also joined the round.
Now headquartered in New York, Cerebrium enables developers to build and scale multimodal AI applications – like voice agents and video models – without heavy infrastructure costs or complexity. The funding will support new features and address growing enterprise demand.
Founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, former tech leads at OneCart (acquired by MassMart in 2021), the company emerged from their own challenges in deploying AI products.
“Tooling was fragmented, and development cycles took months,” said CEO Michael Louis. “We built Cerebrium so engineers can focus on building AI products users love, without hiring infrastructure teams or racking up cloud costs.”
Cerebrium already supports AI innovators such as Tavus, Deepgram, and Vapi. Louis added, “We know AI is changing the world, and we want Cerebrium – a South African-founded company – to be the platform powering it.”
