SA-Founded Cerebrium Raises $8.5M for Serverless AI Infrastructure
TLDR
- Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure platform founded in Cape Town and now headquartered in New York, has raised $8.5 million in seed funding
- The platform addresses key pain points in AI development, including high cloud costs, long development cycles, and fragmented tooling
- The seed round was led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture arm, with backing from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and strategic angel investors
Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure platform founded in Cape Town and now headquartered in New York, has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to expand its capabilities and meet rising enterprise demand.
Founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, Cerebrium enables developers to build, deploy, and scale multimodal AI applications without managing infrastructure. The platform addresses key pain points in AI development, including high cloud costs, long development cycles, and fragmented tooling.
The seed round was led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture arm, with backing from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and strategic angel investors. The new funding will be used to roll out new features and scale support for enterprise clients.
Cerebrium powers advanced AI use cases in real-time voice and video applications, focusing on elastic scalability, compliance, and developer efficiency.
Daba is Africa's leading investment platform for private and public markets. Download here
Key Takeaways
Cerebrium’s raise highlights the growing demand for serverless AI platforms as businesses shift toward real-time, multimodal applications. Developers building AI-driven products are increasingly looking for infrastructure that abstracts away the complexity of scaling, latency, and deployment, without incurring six-figure cloud costs. The company’s approach resonates with enterprises needing fast, secure, and elastic AI environments that don’t require large engineering teams. As AI adoption deepens across industries, Cerebrium is positioning itself as foundational infrastructure, similar to what Twilio did for messaging or Stripe for payments. Its traction, achieved with a lean team, signals that developer-first, infrastructure-as-a-service platforms will play a critical role as the AI ecosystem matures.
Think someone else should see this?
To invest in this opportunity and other opportunities across Africa
Download the daba finance app on your mobile through
Take action.
Download app
Start investing in Africa’s best opportunities, including stocks, bonds, startups, venture funds, and more.
Partner with us
Unlock exciting business opportunities and growth potential.
Join Daba
Become a part of our vibrant community and enjoy exclusive benefits.
Contact us
Reach out to us for inquiries, support, or collaboration.