South Africa’s Verascient Raises USD 1.2 M To Build AI Infrastructure For Enterprises

Cape Town-based AI infrastructure startup Verascient has raised USD 1.2 M (ZAR 19.5 M) in an oversubscribed seed round led by Founder Collective, with participation from Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise, Summit Ventures, and angel investors Alan Knott-Craig and Shayne Mann.

Founded by South Africans Keagan Stokoe and Emile Ferreira, Verascient is building an operating system for AI-native businesses, using a temporal knowledge graph to organise institutional knowledge and make it accessible to AI agents.

The company initially developed a hallucination detector before pivoting to enterprise AI infrastructure targeting financial services, insurance and logistics. Verascient will use the funding to expand its South African engineering team, deepen its technology and support further enterprise deployments.