Cape Town AI startup targets global growth after Google-backed round
South African AI startup Cerebrium raises $8.5M from Google Gradient
South African AI startup Cerebrium has raised $8.5 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture capital fund.
Other notable participants included Y Combinator—the accelerator behind Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, and Reddit—as well as Authentic Ventures and Maxitech.
Cerebrium describes itself as a serverless AI infrastructure platform, built from the ground up to support the next generation of high-performance AI applications.
“From real-time voice bots to multimodal inference pipelines and large-scale batch jobs, we radically simplify how teams deploy, scale, and operate AI workloads — without managing a single server,” the company stated.
Cerebrium positions itself as an alternative to Amazon SageMaker, one of the leading managed machine learning services. It enables ML model deployment on serverless GPUs with a cold start time of under five seconds.
According to Cerebrium, customers typically save around 40% compared to traditional cloud providers. The platform can also scale to over 10,000 requests per minute with minimal engineering overhead.
Current clients include Deepgram, Tavus, Vapi, bitHuman, LiveKit, Superdial, and South Africa’s Lelapa AI.
Cape Town-born startup gains global recognition
Cerebrium was founded in Cape Town by Michael Louis, former CTO of OneCart, and Jonathan Irwin, a senior software engineer. The idea came from their own frustrations building internal AI products:
“Tooling was fragmented, the gap between theory and production was vast, unit economics didn’t make sense, and dev cycles took months,” said Louis.
Although now headquartered in New York, the entire four-person team is South African. The seed funding will go toward feature development and meeting increasing enterprise demand.
Cerebrium is currently hiring remotely for:
- AI/ML Solutions Engineer ($60,000–$130,000/year)
- Senior Platform Engineer ($140,000–$200,000/year)
Gradient partner Eylul Kayin praised the startup for building “some of the most advanced scalable voice and video AI applications.”
Roy Paz-Priel, ML engineer at Tavus, added that Cerebrium consistently delivers the speed and reliability needed for real-time audio and video inference — even at scale.
