South African startup Refiant AI, which uses algorithms to compress artificial intelligence (AI) models, has closed a US$5 million seed round to build its platform, grow its team and support enterprise partnerships.
Founded in 2025 by Viroshan Naicker, Siddharth Gutta, and Mathew Haswell, Refiant AI is building tools that restructure and compress AI models by reducing computational weight and retraining them to maintain performance, so that they can run efficiently on smaller or local machines.
As global companies race to deploy more efficient AI models, they are investing heavily in building data centres equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs) and cooling systems. That energy infrastructure is both expensive and resource-intensive, with Refiant AI working to make the AI models lighter so they require fewer resources to operate.
“AI’s growing energy footprint is one of the most urgent and underappreciated challenges in the climate space,” said Gutta. “The industry’s default answer is to build more data centres and consume more power. Ours is to make the AI itself dramatically more efficient.”
To help it expand, the startup has secured a US$5 million seed round, led by VoLo Earth Ventures, a California-based climate technology fund. “AI’s biggest constraint isn’t demand – it’s energy,” said Joseph Goodman, managing partner of VoLo Earth. “What’s been missing is a fundamentally more efficient way to compute. Refiant’s architecture replaces brute-force scaling with a far more efficient, nature-inspired approach that lowers energy use while increasing capability.”