Cerebrium, the fast-growing provider of serverless AI infrastructure, has announced the successful completion of an $8.5 million seed funding round. The investment was led by Gradient Ventures, with support from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several high-profile angels and operators. This funding marks a significant milestone for the startup as it prepares to expand its platform capabilities and meet the increasing demand from enterprises.
Bridging the AI Infrastructure Gap
Founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin, Cerebrium emerged from the founders’ frustrations in building AI-driven products. Louis, who now serves as CEO, highlighted the challenges of fragmented tooling, steep costs, and lengthy development cycles as major pain points in the industry. Cerebrium’s solution aims to remove these obstacles by offering a simplified, cost-effective, and secure infrastructure for developing advanced AI applications.
Empowering Cutting-Edge AI Use Cases
Cerebrium’s platform is designed specifically for real-time, compute-intensive, multimodal AI workloads. These include voice agents, fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), video model deployments, and large-scale data processing. By providing a fully serverless GPU infrastructure with capabilities such as batching, multi-region deployment, and elastic scaling, Cerebrium allows teams to focus on product innovation without the overhead of managing infrastructure.
Trusted by Industry Innovators
Leading AI companies like Tavus, Deepgram, and Vapi rely on Cerebrium to power their core infrastructure. Roey Paz-Priel, a machine learning engineer at Tavus, emphasized the platform’s speed and reliability as critical factors in their continued partnership. He noted that even amid rapid growth and viral traction, Cerebrium’s infrastructure has consistently met its performance needs without compromising stability.
Investor Confidence in Real-Time AI Potential
Eylul Kayin, Partner at Gradient Ventures, praised Cerebrium’s accomplishments and its importance in the evolving AI landscape. She highlighted the company’s ability to support advanced voice and video applications with a lean team, underscoring the increasing relevance of scalable, specialized infrastructure. Gradient’s investment reflects a broader belief that real-time AI will become central to future customer experiences.
From South Africa to the Global Stage
Originally founded in Cape Town, South Africa, Cerebrium has since relocated its headquarters to New York City. The company plans to use the new capital to accelerate development, launch new platform features, and expand its presence in the enterprise market. As demand for AI infrastructure continues to rise, Cerebrium is positioning itself as a key enabler for teams building high-performance applications at scale.
Cerebrium’s latest funding round underscores its growing influence in the AI infrastructure space. By removing the complexity traditionally associated with scaling multimodal AI applications, the company empowers developers to build faster, smarter, and more securely. With strong backing from leading investors and an expanding customer base, Cerebrium is poised to become a foundational platform for the next generation of AI innovation.