South African-founded AI infrastructure company Verascient has raised $1.2 million (R19.5 million) in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round, with participation from international investors including Founder Collective, Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise and Summit Ventures .
The Cape Town-based startup, founded by South Africans Keagan Stokoe and Emile Ferreira, builds what it calls an operating system for AI-native businesses. Its platform uses a temporal knowledge graph to capture an organisation’s workflows, history and institutional knowledge, making that context available to AI agents that can communicate with each other, spot action items and execute tasks .
The company is initially targeting financial services, insurance and logistics — sectors where large volumes of institutional knowledge are often scattered across emails, documents, meetings, spreadsheets and internal systems .
The round was led by Founder Collective, an early investor in Uber, Airtable and Whoop. Other participants include Andrena Ventures, led by Gideon Valkin, former Commercial Director at Monzo; Cambridge Enterprise, the University of Cambridge’s investment arm; and Summit Ventures . Angel investors include Alan Knott-Craig and Shayne Mann .
Emile Ferreira, co-founder and CTO, says the company’s core technology addresses a fundamental barrier to enterprise AI adoption.
“At the centre of Verascient’s technology is a temporal knowledge graph designed to build and maintain a comprehensive understanding of an organisation, ensuring that information that was once scattered quickly becomes securely available to AI agents while preserving the history, permissions and provenance behind the information,” Ferreira said .
From hallucination detector to enterprise OS
Stokoe previously stated that Verascient’s first product was a hallucination detector for AI models, but it proved unsellable — as large language models improved, they hallucinated less and the problem kept shrinking. The company pivoted to building infrastructure that helps organisations deploy AI meaningfully .
The platform now includes an agent-to-agent messaging protocol, background agents that run without prompting, role-based access control, and more than 1,000 integrations with existing business systems .
Rather than simply providing software, Verascient deploys AI engineers to work directly alongside customers. The company says this is a fundamental part of its model, not an afterthought .
“Ambitious leaders who see AI as a chance to reinvent how their company works will need people who understand both the technology and the realities of deploying it inside an organisation,” Stokoe said. “That’s why our model combines infrastructure with engineers working directly alongside our customers.”
Stokoe, who was previously part of the founding team at Fibertime — the South African pay-as-you-go fibre provider now serving over 1.5 million users per month — argues the adoption of AI creates opportunity rather than displacement .
“AI will change the shape of many jobs. It also creates a real opportunity for South Africa to develop more people who can build and deploy these systems in the real world. South Africa has extraordinary talent,” he said .
Ferreira taught himself to program at age 12 and became an early developer at Replit, now valued at more than $9 billion . While still in high school, he built one of the world’s first on-device AI assistants, which attracted more than 200,000 users and won Most Innovative Solution at the App of the Year Awards .
He later graduated with distinction with an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, where he participated in the university’s SYNC founder programme . Ferreira recently co-authored a paper on enterprise AI cost of ownership with the United Nations International Computing Centre and published research on optimising AI for energy efficiency at the 2026 IEEE/ACM International Conference on AI Engineering .
Stokoe founded Purple Dorm, an AI consultancy that helped organisations across South Africa and the UK identify and implement practical AI applications, before co-founding Verascient .
The founders say they are specifically recruiting what Stokoe describes as the “top 1%” of AI talent in South Africa, with a focus on engineers and AI builders who can work independently on real-world business problems .
“We are looking for high-agency people with the curiosity, technical depth and ambition to build something meaningful to solve real-world problems,” Stokoe said .
The decision to hire engineers in South Africa rather than relocate them has drawn attention. The Open Letter noted this inverts a pattern that South Africa has watched for two decades: founders who left, built at Cambridge and raised from international investors are now putting the engineering team in the country . That decision will only hold if offers compete with salaries in London and Amsterdam .
The company said it will use the capital to expand its engineering team, deepen its technology and support further enterprise deployments