Cape Town AI Startup Verascient Raises R19.2m to Scale Enterprise Technology
Cape Town AI Startup Verascient Raises R19.2m to Scale Enterprise Technology. Cape Town-based artificial intelligence startup Verascient has raised $1.2 million, approximately R19.2 million, in its first funding round as the South African-founded company prepares to expand its engineering team and grow its enterprise AI offering.
Verascient was founded by South Africans Keagan Stokoe and Emile Ferreira. The company develops technology designed to help businesses organise information spread across documents, systems and employees and use it 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.Verascient is initially targeting industries including financial services, insurance and logistics, where companies manage information across emails, documents, spreadsheets, meetings and internal systems.
The company’s technology uses a temporal knowledge graph to organise organisational information while retaining its history, permissions and provenance. Its platform also has more than 1,000 integrations and is designed to work with existing business systems and access controls.
“We start with the work that matters: revenue, operations, customer experience, decision-making and delivery,” said Stokoe, co-founder and CEO of Verascient.
The new funding will support the expansion of Verascient’s engineering team, further development of its technology and additional enterprise deployments.
The company is specifically seeking AI engineers and builders in South Africa, with Stokoe saying it is looking for highly skilled people capable of working 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 company’s founders bring international and local technology experience to the venture. Ferreira taught himself programming from the age of 12 and was an early developer at Replit before developing an on-device AI assistant and completing 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.
