A South Africa-based startup is challenging the AI industry's energy-intensive development model, securing $5 million in seed funding to develop tools that compress and reorganize AI models so they can run on smaller devices using significantly less power.
The round was led by Volo Earth Ventures, a California-based climate technology investor. Refiant AI was founded in 2025 by Viroshan Naicker, Siddharth Gutta, and Matthew Haswell, and creates software that reduces the computational requirements of AI systems while maintaining performance, allowing models to run on local infrastructure rather than large data centers.
The company's headline result shows the potential scale of the approach: Refiant compressed a 120 billion parameter AI model – among the most powerful open-source models available – to run on a MacBook Pro with just 12 gigabytes of RAM.
The startup is entering the market amid increasing pressure. Global data center power consumption is expected to double by 2028, driven largely by the explosive growth of large language model and generative AI workloads. Major technology companies are projected to spend nearly $700 billion in 2026 alone on building the infrastructure to sustain AI development.
Joseph Goodman of Volo Earth Ventures said the fundamental constraint on AI is not demand but energy, and Refient's approach replaces brute-force scaling with more efficient architectures that reduce energy use while increasing capacity.
Refiant's team includes a former Google Cloud architect, a University of Cambridge doctoral researcher, and an engineer with NASA experience. The company is in discussions with several multinational technology companies on how its approach could reduce AI computing costs while maintaining data and energy sovereignty.
Specifically for Africa, Refient said the continent's AI ambitions are currently hampered by limited data center infrastructure and reliance on foreign cloud providers, making the case for efficient, locally driven AI models particularly relevant to the region.