Funding led by Gradient, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, to meet growing enterprise demand and accelerate development of its core platform

Cerebrium, the serverless AI infrastructure platform enabling teams to build and scale multimodal AI applications without the traditional complexity or cost, announced an $8.5 million seed round led by Gradient, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angels and operators.

Cerebrium was founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin after struggling to build their own AI-driven products. “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 Michael Louis, CEO and co-founder of Cerebrium. “We built Cerebrium so engineers can focus on building AI products users love that have real business impact instead of hiring an infrastructure team, racking up six-figure cloud bills or worrying about security and compliance”

Cerebrium powers some of the most innovative companies pushing the boundaries in AI, including Tavus, Deepgram, Vapi, and many more. The platform is purpose-built for high-performance, real-time multimodal AI applications: voice agents, LLM fine-tuning, video models, and large-scale data analytics use cases. While Cerebrium is known for its serverless GPU infrastructure, it also offers the ability to do batching, multi-region deployments, large scale data processing and much more. This enables teams to run compute-intensive workloads with minimal setup, scale elastically, and only pay for what they use, without the complexity of managing infrastructure while adhering to strict security and data residency requirements.

“We run a range of real-time audio and video models, and performance is everything. We tried a number of solutions, but Cerebrium consistently delivered the speed and reliability we needed without the overhead. Even as we’ve scaled rapidly and gone viral, they’ve kept up with our compute demands and delivered the stability we rely on. It has become a core part of our infrastructure!” - Roey Paz-Priel, ML engineer, Tavus

“What the Cerebrium team has pulled off with such a small group is incredible. They’re powering some of the most advanced AI voice and video applications at scale and we believe specialized infrastructure which scales elastically will be essential as real-time AI becomes core to customer experiences,” said Eylul Kayin, Partner at Gradient.

Founded in Cape Town, South Africa and now headquartered in New York City, this new funding will allow the team at Cerebrium to invest in new features and meet surging enterprise demand. AI is changing the world, and Cerebrium wants to be the platform powering it.

About Cerebrium

Cerebrium is a high-performing serverless AI infrastructure platform that enables teams to build, deploy, and scale multimodal AI applications. From real-time voice agents to LLM fine-tuning and large-scale batch processing, Cerebrium offers low-latency, serverless GPU compute across 12+ chip types with cold starts as low as 2 seconds. Used by teams at Tavus, Deepgram, Vapi and many others. For more information visit www.cerebrium.ai

About Gradient

Gradient has been investing at the forefront of artificial intelligence since 2017. We are led by former founders, technical experts, and domain specialists who have supported hundreds of AI founders from the beginning. Gradient is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.gradient.com.