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Verascient, a South African artificial intelligence startup, has closed an oversubscribed pre-Seed funding round worth $1.2 million to grow its enterprise AI platform.
The round drew backing from Founder Collective, Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise and Summit Ventures, along with angel investors Alan Knott-Craig and Shayne Mann. Verascient said it plans to use the new funding to expand its technical capabilities, scale enterprise deployments and recruit specialised engineering talent in South Africa.
“We’re very aware that it’s simply a start, and there’s so much still to do,” said Keagan Stokoe, co-founder and CEO of Verascient. “But we want to pull people towards the frontier of what’s possible with AI and show them what it can actually mean for them and their business. We also want to work with the most talented people to make this happen.”
Co-founded by CTO Emile Ferreira and Stokoe, Verascient builds software that helps organisations consolidate institutional knowledge that is otherwise scattered across emails, spreadsheets, meeting notes and legacy systems.
Before starting Verascient, Ferreira worked as an early developer at Replit and holds an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. He also built an on-device AI assistant while still in high school. Stokoe was a founding team member at Fibertime and previously founded the AI consultancy Purple Dorm.
Through Verascient, the founders want to organise the consolidated data by developing customised workflows and AI agents designed to operate inside clients’ day-to-day operations. The company is initially focused on the financial services, insurance and logistics sectors, industries that tend to sit on large volumes of unstructured internal data and stand to benefit from automating routine, knowledge-intensive processes.
At the centre of the platform is what the company calls a temporal knowledge graph, a system built to track how organisational information changes over time while preserving data provenance, existing access controls and historical context. The company says this graph “builds up your company’s collective knowledge and workflows, and makes them available to your agents”, enabling those agents “to collaborate, beyond human speed”.
In addition to the knowledge graph, Verascient is also focusing on the infrastructure needed to support these AI agents. It claims reliable execution, role-based access control for users and teams, audit trails, secrets management, and integrations with tools organisations already use.
The platform can run in a private instance hosted by Verascient, or in a client’s own cloud or on-premise environment, an option aimed at organisations with strict data-residency or security requirements. The company also says it deploys forward-based engineers who work directly with client teams to identify inefficiencies, redesign processes and help clients get more value from the system.
While every company is adopting or using AI, not every organisation truly benefits from proper deployment. Verascient wants to solve that by becoming the infrastructure for “AI-native” organisations, businesses that want to organise their institutional knowledge and make it continuously available to AI agents operating across their systems.
