Verascient secures $1.2 million to deploy enterprise artificial intelligence infrastructure

Verascient secures $1.2 million to deploy enterprise artificial intelligence infrastructure

The South African startup raised pre-seed capital from international investors to expand its temporal knowledge graph platform across the financial services, insurance and logistics sectors

Verascient, a Cape Town-based startup that builds an operating system for artificial intelligence-native businesses, has secured $1.2 million (R19.5 million) in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round. The infrastructure company uses a temporal knowledge graph to capture enterprise workflows, history and institutional knowledge, making this context available to artificial intelligence agents that can communicate with each other, identify action items and execute tasks.

The funding round was led by Founder Collective, an investment firm that backed technology companies including Uber, Airtable and Whoop. Additional capital came from Cambridge Enterprise, the investment arm of the University of Cambridge; Andrena Ventures, an investment firm led by Gideon Valkin; and Summit Ventures, a participating fund. Angel investors Alan Knott-Craig and Shayne Mann also participated.

The startup targets financial services and insurance firms, as well as the logistics sector. In these industries, large volumes of institutional knowledge reside across emails, documents, meetings, spreadsheets and internal systems. Verascient first developed a hallucination detector for artificial intelligence models. The founders pivoted to building enterprise deployment infrastructure after noting that large language models were improving and hallucinating less.

The current platform features an agent-to-agent messaging protocol, background agents that operate without user prompts, role-based access control and more than 1,000 integrations with existing business systems. Instead of just providing software, the company deploys its engineers to work alongside customers to implement the systems.

“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,” said Emile Ferreira, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Verascient.

Ferreira taught himself to program at age 12 and later worked as a developer at Replit, a software firm now valued at more than $9 billion. While in high school, he built an on-device artificial intelligence assistant that acquired more than 200,000 users. He later graduated with an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. Ferreira co-authored a paper on enterprise artificial intelligence ownership costs with the United Nations International Computing Centre and published energy efficiency research at the 2026 IEEE/ACM International Conference on AI Engineering.

Co-founder Keagan Stokoe served on the founding team at Fibertime, a South African pay-as-you-go fibre provider serving more than 1.5 million users per month. He later founded Purple Dorm, a consultancy that helped organizations across South Africa and the United Kingdom implement practical artificial intelligence applications.

“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.”

Verascient plans to use the new capital to expand its engineering team while deepening its core technology to support additional enterprise deployments. The founders intend to recruit engineering talent in South Africa.

“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.

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