Cerebrium’s Path From Cape Town to YC and $8.5M in Funding

When Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin were building AI capabilities at their last startup, OneCart, they faced a familiar challenge: provisioning GPU resources, managing inference workloads, and scaling models reliably across environments took more time and capital than expected. The duo, who served as CTO and lead engineer at the South African e-commerce company, saw an opportunity to abstract away these infrastructure burdens for other engineering teams.

That idea became Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure platform that has quickly found traction among developers building real-time, multimodal applications. On Tuesday, the company announced it raised $8.5 million in seed funding, led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angel investors. The round marks a milestone not only for Cerebrium but for African-founded startups aiming to scale globally from day one.

“Tooling was fragmented, there was an education gap between theory and production, the unit economics didn’t make sense, and development cycles took months,” said Louis. “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.”

Cerebrium’s platform provides serverless CPU and GPU infrastructure that can be spun up or down instantly. Users pay only for active compute time, making the platform ideal for volatile AI workloads such as real-time voice agents, video generation, or fine-tuning large language models where traditional infrastructure can result in high idle costs.