Michael Louis

Michael Louis is co-founder and CEO of Cerebrium, a serverless AI infrastructure company he started with Jonathan Irwin in Cape Town, South Africa, and later moved to New York City.

Lessons from OneCart

Louis and Irwin built AI features at OneCart, a South African startup later acquired by Walmart-owned Massmart, according to Gradient. They stitched together many tools to train, deploy, and debug models, and the costs stayed high. “Tooling was fragmented, there was an education gap between theory and production, the unit economics didn't make sense, and development cycles took months,” Louis said in Cerebrium's announcement of its seed round.

Cerebrium went through Y Combinator in 2022. Louis's goal for the product is to remove the infrastructure team from the equation. “We built Cerebrium so engineers can focus on building AI products users love that have real business impact instead of hiring an infrastructure team, racking up six-figure cloud bills or worrying about security and compliance,” he said.