South African AI startup, Cerebrium, secures $8.5 million funding to expand its real-time AI infrastructure
Cerebrium, a groundbreaking serverless AI infrastructure platform, has announced an $8.5 million seed round led by Gradient. The funding will enable the team at Cerebrium to invest in new features and meet surging enterprise demand.
Founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin in Cape Town, South Africa, Cerebrium aims to be the platform powering the changing world of AI. The duo faced challenges in building their own AI-driven products due to fragmented tools, an education gap, high costs, and long development cycles. Cerebrium was born out of a need to simplify the development process and provide a scalable solution for real-time AI applications.
Cerebrium offers a range of key features designed to streamline AI development and deployment. Its serverless architecture allows clients to deploy and run AI applications without the hassle of provisioning complex infrastructure, offering flexibility and scalability. The platform also supports multimodal data types, including text, images, audio, and video, making it ideal for applications like voice agents and video models.
One of the standout features of Cerebrium is its fast deployment capabilities. The platform offers sub-5 second cold-start times for applications, ensuring rapid execution and interaction. Additionally, Cerebrium introduces "cerebrium run," which allows code execution in the cloud in just 1-2 seconds. The platform also provides access to serverless GPU resources, enabling compute-intensive workloads without the need for manual infrastructure management.
Cerebrium's cost-efficiency is another significant advantage. Clients only pay for the compute time used, reducing costs associated with idle resources. The platform also ensures security and compliance, handling strict data residency standards.
Roey Paz-Priel, an ML engineer at Tavus, praises Cerebrium for delivering the speed and reliability needed for real-time audio and video models. Tavus has scaled rapidly and gone viral with Cerebrium's support, keeping up with the compute demands and delivering stability.
Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angels and operators participated in the seed round, joining Gradient in supporting Cerebrium's mission. Eylul Kayin, Partner at Gradient, praises Cerebrium for powering advanced AI voice and video applications at scale.
Cerebrium's serverless AI infrastructure platform is purpose-built for high-performance, real-time multimodal AI applications such as voice agents, LLM fine-tuning, video models, and large-scale data analytics use cases. By simplifying development, ensuring scalability, and offering cost savings, Cerebrium is quickly becoming a go-to solution for innovative AI companies, including Tavus, Deepgram, Vapi, and many more. Cerebrium is headquartered in New York City.
- With the funding, Cerebrium plans to invest in new features, particularly expanding its support for artificial-intelligence applications, such as voice agents and video models, by handling diverse multimodal data types like text, images, audio, and video.
- Another key feature of Cerebrium is its serverless GPU resources, which enables clients to perform compute-intensive workloads without the need for manual infrastructure management, providing a more efficient and cost-effective solution for AI development.
- Cerebrium ensures the security and compliance of clients' data by handling strict data residency standards, while also providing rapid execution and interaction with sub-5 second cold-start times for applications and 1-2 second code execution in the cloud using "cerebrium run."
- The fast deployment capabilities and cost-efficiency of Cerebrium's platform have been praised by ML engineers, as exemplified by Tavus, which has scaled rapidly and delivered stability with Cerebrium's support, maintaining real-time audio and video models and keeping up with the compute demands.
