Grace Ashiru
Cape Town-founded Verascient closed an oversubscribed $1.2 million (R19.5 million) pre-seed round, its first outside capital, to build the layer that gives AI agents access to what a company already knows.
Founder Collective led the international side of the cheque. Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise and Summit Ventures also came in, joined by angels Alan Knott-Craig and Shayne Mann. The round was oversubscribed.
Keagan Stokoe, previously on the founding team at fibre startup Fibertime, runs the company as CEO. Emile Dos Santos Ferreira is CTO.
The product sits on a temporal knowledge graph. Instead of pointing an agent at a folder and hoping, Verascient stitches together what lives in documents, email threads, meeting notes, spreadsheets and internal systems, then keeps the history, permissions and provenance attached. Agents query that graph. The company then builds the workflows that run on top of it.
Its first market is the set of industries where institutional knowledge is both enormous and badly filed: financial services, insurance, logistics.
Verascient does not sell software and walk away. Teams embed inside client organisations, which is Stokoe’s bet on where the actual bottleneck sits. He argues the constraint is people who understand the technology and the mess of deploying it inside a real company, not the models themselves.
The money goes to engineers. Stokoe says he is hiring a small team and wants the top 1% of AI talent in South Africa, working on problems for clients anywhere in the world.
