South Africa: SA-Founded Cerebrium Raises $8.5m for Serverless Ai Infrastructure

10 July 2025
Daba Finance (Abidjan)

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.

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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.

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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.

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