The Front Lines How Cerebrium generated millions in ARR through partnerships without a sales team | Michael Louis
Cerebrium is a serverless AI infrastructure platform orchestrating CPU and GPU compute for companies building voice agents, healthcare AI systems, manufacturing defect detection, and LLM hosting. The company operates across global markets handling data residency constraints from GDPR to Saudi Arabia's data sovereignty requirements. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Michael Louis, Co-Founder & CEO of Cerebrium, to explore how they built a high-performance infrastructure business serving enterprise customers with high five-figure to six-figure ACVs while maintaining 99.9%+ SLA requirements.
Topics Discussed:
- Building AI infrastructure before the GPT moment and strategic patience during the hype cycle
- Scaling a distributed engineering team between Cape Town and NYC with 95% South African talent
- Partnership-driven revenue generation producing millions in ARR without traditional sales teams
- AI-powered market engineering achieving 35% LinkedIn reply rates through competitor analysis
- Technical differentiation through cold start optimization and network latency improvements
- Revenue expansion through global deployment and regulatory compliance automation
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
- Treat go-to-market as a systems engineering problem: Michael reframed traditional sales challenges through an engineering lens, focusing on constraints, scalability, and data-driven optimization. "I try to reframe my go to market problem as an engineering one and try to pick up, okay, like what are my constraints? Like how can I do this, how can it scale?" This systematic approach led to testing 8-10 different strategies, measuring conversion rates, and building automated pipelines rather than relying on manual processes that don't scale.
- Structure partnerships for partner success before revenue sharing: Cerebrium generates millions in ARR through partners whose sales teams actively upsell their product. Their approach eliminates typical partnership friction: "We typically approach our partners saying like, look, you keep the money you make, we'll keep the money we make. If it goes well, we can talk about like rev share or some other agreement down the line." This removes commission complexity that kills B2B partnerships and allows partners to focus on customer value rather than internal revenue allocation conflicts.
- Build AI-powered competitive intelligence for outbound at scale: Cerebrium's 35% LinkedIn reply rate comes from scraping competitor followers and LinkedIn engagement, running prospects through qualification agents that check funding status, ICP fit, and technical roles, then generating personalized outreach referencing specific interactions. "We saw you commented on Michael's post about latency in voice. Like, we think that's interesting. Like, here's a case study we did in the voice space." The system processes thousands of prospects while maintaining personalization depth that manual processes can't match.
- Position infrastructure as revenue expansion, not cost optimization: While dev tools typically focus on developer productivity gains, Cerebrium frames their value proposition around market expansion and revenue growth. "We allow you to deploy your application in many different markets globally... go to market leaders love us and sales leaders because again we open up more markets for them and more revenue without getting their tech team involved." This messaging resonates with revenue stakeholders and justifies higher spending compared to pure cost-reduction positioning.
- Weaponize regulatory complexity as competitive differentiation: Cerebrium abstracts data sovereignty requirements across multiple jurisdictions - GDPR in Europe, data residency in Saudi Arabia, and other regional compliance frameworks. "As a company to build the infrastructure to have data sovereignty in all these companies and markets, it's a nightmare." By handling this complexity, they create significant switching costs and enable customers to expand internationally without engineering roadmap dependencies, making them essential to sales teams pursuing global accounts.
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