South African-founded AI startup Verascient has raised $1.2m (about R19.2m) in its first funding round as it looks to expand its engineering team and grow its enterprise AI offering.
Emile Dos Santos Ferreira, CTO (left) and Keagan Stokoe, CEO (right) | image supplied
The Cape Town-based company was founded by South Africans Keagan Stokoe and Emile Ferreira. It works with businesses to organise information spread across documents, systems and employees and use that information to build AI-supported workflows and agents.
The funding round was led by Founder Collective, with participation from Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise, Summit Ventures and several angel investors.
Targeting enterprise AI adoption
Verascient is initially focused on sectors including financial services, insurance and logistics, where businesses often manage large volumes of information across emails, documents, spreadsheets, meetings and internal systems.
The company says its technology uses a temporal knowledge graph to organise organisational information while retaining its history, permissions and provenance. It combines this infrastructure with AI engineers who work directly with customers to identify potential applications and build systems around their business requirements.
“We start with the work that matters: revenue, operations, customer experience, decision-making and delivery,” said Stokoe, co-founder and CEO of Verascient.
The company says its platform currently includes more than 1,000 integrations and is designed to work with existing business systems and access controls.
Looking for South African AI talent
The funding will be used to expand Verascient's engineering team and develop its technology as it takes on more enterprise deployments.
The company is specifically looking to recruit what Stokoe describes as the “top 1%” of AI talent in South Africa, with a focus on engineers and AI builders with strong technical skills and the ability to 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 founders say the company intends to use South African talent to build technology for businesses in international markets as it scales.
Founders with international AI experience
Ferreira taught himself programming from the age of 12 and was an early developer at Replit. He later developed an on-device AI assistant and completed an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge.
Stokoe was previously part of the founding team at South African fibre infrastructure company Fibertime before establishing AI consultancy Purple Dorm, which worked with organisations in South Africa and the UK.
Verascient says it will use the new capital to grow its engineering team, deepen its technology and support further enterprise deployments.
