A South African AI start-up, led by 19-year-old entrepreneur Gurveer Singh, has secured the backing of Y Combinator, the prestigious Silicon Valley business accelerator that has backed the likes of OpenAI and Airbnb.
Founded in Cape Town by Singh, who serves as CEO, and by Adam Gamieldien (20) and Isaac Nichols (23), Certus AI was founded with the aim of making restaurant bookings as well as food orders and deliveries seamless and automated using advanced, voice-based artificial intelligence tools, helping restaurants maximise their sales in the process.
Singh said in an interview with TechCentral this week that the idea for Certus AI came when he was working in his parent’s business, a chain of South African restaurants called Punjab.
“Restaurants had just come out of Covid, and I was helping my parents with their website and social media,” he said. He remembered how difficult it was to manage the phones, realising many restaurants struggle with this basic function that costs them untold lost business simply because they can’t always man the phones.
He started Certus AI with former classmate Gamieldien and Nichols – who Singh and Gamieldien “met at the gym”. The young team applied to Y Combinator and were accepted (on their second attempt) three months ago into the rigorous programme for start-ups, and secured a multimillion-rand early-stage funding round at the same time.
Singh, who was born in Durban and who moved to Cape Town with his Indian-born parents when he was 6, relocated two years ago to the UK to do his A levels (a bridge between school and higher education).
Certus AI is registered in the UK and more recently was registered in the US “because our investors and customers are based there”.
Y Combinator backing
The Certus system, which is built on technology from OpenAI, Google and others, uses AI agents to take and monitor calls to restaurants to ensure mistakes are kept to a minimum in an environment where the risk of error is high.
“We have 98.6% order accuracy. It turns out AI is better at finding its own mistakes than preventing itself from making mistakes in the first place,” Singh said.
Certus hopes its technology will help restaurants replace their phone lines entirely. The technology can even be used to upsell to customers, maximising order revenue, he said. Certus integrates with the like of Uber Eats and DoorDash for deliveries, too.
Listen to the system in action
“When we take the order, we send it straight to the point of sale and the kitchen’s display system,” he explained. It’s then despatched automatically to a delivery driver.
Even restaurants that don’t use technology, or have rudimentary tech setups — as many do — have been catered for. “We have a printer for customers who don’t have a point-of-sale system. We configure a Raspberry Pi, allowing them to print out receipts.”
The founders, including Singh, are now planning to relocate to San Francisco – the heart of the global tech venture capital ecosystem and the home of Y Combinator. However, they hope to retain their South African identities.
“I’m bullish about keeping my roots in South Africa, where there are so many smart people,” said Singh. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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