Refiant AI, a South African startup that compresses artificial intelligence (AI) models using algorithms, has completed a US$5 million seed round to develop its platform, expand its staff, and foster business partnerships.
Refiant AI, which was founded in 2025 by Viroshan Naicker, Siddharth Gutta, and Mathew Haswell, is developing tools that compress and restructure AI models by lowering their computational weight and retraining them to maintain performance, allowing them to operate effectively on smaller or local machines.
Global corporations are making significant investments in the construction of data centers with graphics processing units (GPUs) and cooling systems as they compete to implement more effective AI models.
Refiant AI is attempting to make the AI models lighter so they require fewer resources to operate, but the energy infrastructure is costly and resource-intensive.
“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.”
VoLo Earth Ventures, a California-based climate technology fund, led a US $5 million seed round to support the startup’s growth.
“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.”
