Cerebrium, a South African-born startup that helps developers run AI apps without worrying about the tech setup, has raised an $8.5 million seed round to hire more engineers, grow the core platform, and scale operations to meet rising enterprise demand.
Graident, Google’s AI venture fund, led the round, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angel investors and operators.
Cerebrium was founded in 2021 by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, who previously held roles as CTO and lead engineer at OneCart, a South African online grocery delivery platform, acquired by MassMart, a major retail and wholesale group, the same year. Frustrated by the fragmented tooling and long development cycles they encountered while building AI-driven products, the duo launched Cerebrium to streamline the process for others.
“We built Cerebrium so engineers can focus on building AI products that users love with real business impact, instead of hiring an infrastructure team, racking up six-figure cloud bills, or worrying about security and compliance, “ said Louis.
The global market for companies like Cerebrium is estimated to exceed $197 billion in 2030, driven by demand for real-time AI applications, generative models, and multimodal systems. Developer-first platforms are gaining traction as companies seek faster deployment and lower overhead. AI that can handle voice, video, and text all at once—called multimodal AI—is growing fast, and Cerebrium is built for this kind of real-time performance. Tech like GPU-as-a-service (renting powerful chips instead of owning them) makes it easier for startups and smaller companies in this space to compete.
As part of a fast-growing company building infrastructure for AI, Cerebrium says its focus is on performance, security, and tools that work in multiple regions, including Africa, the U.S., and Europe.
“We are betting on the next wave of AI applications being real-time, multimodal, and deeply integrated into customer experiences,” said Louis. This means that the system needs to be quick, easy to use, and built for developers—without all the hassle of setting up hardware or dealing with complicated tech.
“AI adoption is accelerating across industries, and we are focused on building a robust, secure, and scalable foundation that can support that growth — especially for real-time, latency-sensitive use cases,” said Louis.
“Real-time AI will become central to how customers interact with products,” says Eylul Kayin, Partner at Gradient. “Cerebrium’s tech scales elastically, and that’s going to matter more and more.”
What Cerebrium Does
Cerebrium makes running powerful AI chatbots, voice assistants, and smart video tools easier and cheaper without complicated setups or expensive servers. It’s serverless, meaning companies only pay for what they use, and the system scales up or down automatically.
Platforms based in the U.S. and Europe with a global presence, such as Tavus (an AI video avatar creator), Deepgram ( an instant speech-to-text platform), and Vapi (which builds voice assistants for automated customer support) already use Cerebrium to run fast, real-time AI systems that respond instantly, a growing demand as businesses look to build smarter, more responsive experiences.
“We run a lot of audio and video models in real time,” says Roey Paz-Priel, a machine learning engineer at Tavus. “Cerebrium gives us the speed and stability we need — even when things scale up quickly.”
At the backend, Cerebrium claims that its building tools handle everything from fast startup times to secure code execution and better monitoring for developers. Some upgrades include reducing loading time for AI models; improving memory and the part of the computer that handles images, videos, and visual tasks for faster processing; creating secure containers so developers can run untrusted code safely; and making it easier to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. Cerebrium is also building features to let companies deploy in specific regions, helpful for meeting local data rules and reducing latency.
Cerebrium’s long-term goal is to become the go-to platform for AI-native applications. That means helping businesses build entire products powered by AI, not just single tools or models.
“From sales agents to onboarding flows to healthcare support, we want Cerebrium to be the infrastructure behind it all,” Louis said.
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