South African AI company Cerebrium secures $8.5 million in funding to expand its top-tier serverless AI platform
New York City-based Cerebrium, a groundbreaking serverless AI infrastructure platform, has recently secured an $8.5 million seed funding round, led by Gradient, Google's AI venture fund. This investment will help Cerebrium meet the surging demand from enterprises for its innovative technology.
Founded in Cape Town by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, Cerebrium was created with a mission to address common challenges in the AI industry, such as fragmented tooling, an education gap, unprofitable unit economics, and lengthy development cycles.
Cerebrium's platform is purpose-built for high-performance, real-time multimodal AI applications, including voice agents, large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, video models, and large-scale data analytics. Its serverless GPU infrastructure allows teams to run compute-intensive workloads with minimal setup and elastic scaling, ensuring users only pay for what they use.
Additional capabilities, such as batching, multi-region deployments, and large-scale data processing, provide flexibility and scalability for various AI workloads. Cerebrium's proven reliability and performance at scale have been validated by customers like Tavus, which rely on Cerebrium for real-time audio and video processing with consistent speed, stability, and the ability to scale rapidly without overhead or infrastructure bottlenecks.
Eylul Kayin, partner at Gradient, expressed admiration for Cerebrium's accomplishments, stating, "Cerebrium's platform is poised to become the leading high-performance serverless AI platform, powering cutting-edge AI applications by providing specialized, elastic infrastructure optimized for real-time AI workloads without the operational complexity traditionally associated with such infrastructure."
Kayin believes that specialized infrastructure that scales elastically will be essential as real-time AI becomes core to customer experiences. With the new funding, Cerebrium plans to invest in new features and continue to meet the growing needs of AI teams worldwide.
Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angel investors and operators also participated in Cerebrium's seed funding round. The founders of Cerebrium struggled to build their own AI-driven products, which inspired them to create a platform that frees engineers from worrying about infrastructure, cloud costs, security, and compliance so they can focus on building AI products with real business impact.
Currently based in New York City, Cerebrium's innovative serverless AI infrastructure platform is set to revolutionize the way teams build, deploy, and scale multimodal AI applications.
Angel investors, including Y Combinator and several strategic individuals, have also invested in Cerebrium, recognizing its potential in the real-time artificial-intelligence sector. With the funds raised, Cerebrium plans to expand its technology, focusing on artificial-intelligence applications that leverage its serverless infrastructure for high-performance AI workloads.
