News
Refiant raises $5 million Seed led by VoLo Earth Ventures
South African startup Refiant AI has raised a $5 million Seed led by VoLo Earth Ventures to shrink large AI models so they run on small, local devices.
By Propel Africa · 2026-04-09
Refiant, a South African startup, has raised a $5 million Seed round led by VoLo Earth Ventures, a California climate technology fund, TechCabal reported on 9 April.
What Refiant does
Refiant AI builds tools that reduce the computational load of AI models and retrain them to keep their performance, so they can run on smaller or local devices. It was founded by Viroshan Naicker, Siddharth Gutta and Mathew Haswell. The company targets organisations in regions with limited computing infrastructure and costly cloud access, citing banking, telecoms and government services as examples.
Early results
Refiant says it compressed a 120 billion parameter model to run on a laptop with 12GB of RAM, where such a model would normally need at least 80GB. The compressed model kept 95 to 99% of its original performance and used more than 80% less energy. The company is in talks with multinational technology firms.
Use of funds
The money will go to platform development, growing the team and enterprise partnerships.
At a glance
- Company: Refiant AI
- Raised: $5 million
- Round: Seed
- Lead: VoLo Earth Ventures
- Founders: Viroshan Naicker, Siddharth Gutta, Mathew Haswell
- Key figure: 120 billion parameter model run on a 12GB laptop