South African AI startup Verascient has raised $1.2 million in an oversubscribed seed round. The round was backed by Founder Collective, Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise and Summit Ventures.
The startup is initially targeting sectors such as financial services, insurance and logistics, where critical business knowledge is often spread across emails, spreadsheets, meetings and legacy systems.
Bringing investors backing to a company aiming that businesses need more than one AI tool to make technology useful, the new capital will be used to expand Verascient's engineering team and deepen its technology as it works towards more enterprise deployments.
For South Africa's AI ecosystem, the company plans to use the funding to recruit local AI engineers while building for customers beyond the country and help businesses connect information and automate workflows.
This round sends a signal to founders building from African markets as global investors are willing to finance African teams developing AI products.
