Verascient, a South African AI startup, has raised $1.2 million (R19.5 million) in its first funding round. The company builds infrastructure that turns scattered company knowledge into shared context for AI agents.
The oversubscribed round was backed by Founder Collective, an early investor in Uber, Airtable and Whoop. Other investors include Andrena Ventures, led by former Monzo Commercial Director Gideon Valkin, Cambridge Enterprise (the University of Cambridge’s investment arm), and Summit Ventures. Angel investors Alan Knott-Craig and Shayne Mann also participated.
Verascient was founded by Emile Ferreira and Keagan Stokoe. The company works inside client organisations to consolidate knowledge spread across documents, emails, meetings, spreadsheets and internal systems. It then builds workflows and AI agents that use that knowledge in daily operations.
The startup is targeting financial services, insurance and logistics companies first. These sectors tend to hold large volumes of institutional knowledge across disconnected sources.
At the core of the product is a temporal knowledge graph. Ferreira, the company’s CTO, said the graph maintains a full picture of an organisation and makes information available to AI agents while preserving history, permissions and provenance.
According to Ferreira, many businesses give employees access to AI tools without building systems that let a company operate intelligently with AI. Verascient closes that gap by working directly with businesses to understand how people and processes function, then building infrastructure that lets AI agents work within existing systems and access controls.
The company also focuses on work tied to revenue, operations, customer experience, decision-making and delivery. According to Stokoe, each improvement compounds because it makes the next one easier to implement.
Verascient pairs its infrastructure with in-house AI engineers who work alongside client teams. Stokoe described this as central to the company’s model, saying businesses need people who understand both the technology and the practical realities of deploying it.
Ferreira taught himself to program at age 12 and later became an early developer at Replit, now valued above $9 billion. He built one of the first on-device AI assistants, which drew more than 200,000 users and won an award for innovation while he was still in high school.
He holds an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from Cambridge, completed with distinction, and has since co-authored a paper on enterprise AI cost of ownership with the United Nations International Computing Centre.
Stokoe was part of the founding team at Fibertime, the South African fibre infrastructure company led by Alan Knott-Craig that now serves more than 1.5 million users a month. He later founded Purple Dorm, an AI consultancy that worked with organisations in South Africa and the UK.
Verascient plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team and grow its technology to support more enterprise deployments. Stokoe said the company is hiring for a small team of engineers and AI builders, describing its goal as attracting the top 1% of AI talent in South Africa.
Last updated: August 24, 2026
