Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure platform designed to simplify the deployment and scaling of multimodal AI applications, announced the close of an $8.5 million seed funding round. The round was led by Gradient, with participation from Y Combinator, Authentic Ventures, and several strategic angels and operators.
The company was founded by Michael Louis and Jonathan Irwin after encountering challenges while developing 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 now supports cutting-edge AI companies such as Tavus, Deepgram, and Vapi. Built specifically for high-performance, real-time multimodal AI applications — including voice agents, LLM fine-tuning, video models, and large-scale data analytics — Cerebrium provides developers with robust capabilities like serverless GPU infrastructure, batching, multi-region deployments, and large-scale data processing. These features enable seamless execution of compute-heavy workloads, dynamic scalability, cost efficiency, and compliance with stringent security and data residency standards.
“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.
Originally founded in Cape Town, South Africa and now headquartered in New York City, Cerebrium will use the new funding to expand platform capabilities and meet growing enterprise demand. As real-time AI transforms digital experiences, Cerebrium is positioning its infrastructure at the center of that shift.