AI infrastructure platform Cerebrium has raised an $8.5 million seed round led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Authentic Ventures.
Cerebrium, cofounded in Cape Town by CEO Michael Louis and CTO Jonathan Irwin and headquartered in New York, is a platform used by its customers’ engineering teams to build and scale multimodal AI applications — which can process different types of data, including text, images, and audio.
Cerebrium works across three main categories, Louis said: Voice AI, real-time digital avatars, and healthcare.
Cerebrium provides the infrastructure building blocks behind the scenes — such as model inference and training, and data processing — allowing engineers to focus on their core product and workflows, Louis told BI. It also helps customers to deploy their applications in different regions.
“We believe specialized infrastructure, which scales elastically, will be essential as real-time AI becomes core to customer experiences,” Gradient partner Eylul Kayin said in a statement.
Louis formerly founded the e-commerce startup OneCart, which was acquired by Walmart-owned Massmart in 2021. The idea for Cerebrium came as the team struggled to build machine learning at the on-demand grocery delivery company, Louis said.
Cerebrium offers serverless CPU and GPU infrastructure that spins up and down quickly, making it ideal for volatile workloads and cost-effective for clients, Louis said. “What that means is you only get charged for that exact time that it was basically running for,” he said.
The company currently counts only four engineers and is generating millions in annual recurring revenue. It counts among its clients AI-generated video purveyor Tavus and voice AI companies Deepgram and Vapi.
The company will use funds to hire more engineers to meet enterprise demand and introduce new features, Louis said.
Here’s a look at the pitch deck Cerebrium used to raise $8.5 million in seed funding. Some slides and details have been redacted in order to share the deck publicly.
