South African-Born AI Startup Cerebrium Raises $8.5M to Scale Global Serverless AI Infrastructure
Cerebrium, a high-performance serverless AI infrastructure platform originally founded in Cape Town, has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to expand its groundbreaking services that power real-time, multimodal AI applications globally. The round was led by Gradient, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and strategic angel investors.
Founded by South African tech entrepreneurs Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin—formerly of OneCart, a company acquired by MassMart in 2021—Cerebrium is now headquartered in New York City. The funding will accelerate platform development, meet surging enterprise demand, and cement Cerebrium’s role in transforming how AI applications are built and scaled.
“This investment represents a major milestone not only for us but also for African-founded tech on the global stage,” said Michael Louis, CEO and Co-Founder. “We created Cerebrium so engineers can deploy powerful AI products with ease—without needing complex infrastructure teams or incurring massive cloud bills.”
Cerebrium’s serverless GPU platform supports demanding use cases such as LLM fine-tuning, voice agents, video AI, and large-scale analytics. Its elastic, real-time capabilities have already attracted major AI innovators like Tavus, Deepgram, and Vapi.
Roey Paz-Priel, Machine Learning Engineer at Tavus, praised the platform: “We’ve relied on Cerebrium for high-speed, stable deployment of audio and video models—even under viral growth. It’s an essential part of our tech stack.”
Gradient Partner Eylul Kayin added: “Cerebrium’s lean team has achieved what many larger companies have struggled to—scalable, real-time AI infrastructure that doesn’t compromise on performance or flexibility.”
Beyond serverless GPU compute, Cerebrium supports multi-region deployments, batching, and robust data compliance—enabling startups and enterprises alike to innovate without the usual infrastructure burdens.
With this funding, Cerebrium aims to expand its technical capabilities and workforce, further solidifying its mission to be the go-to platform for the future of AI—one built by African founders and backed by global visionaries.
