Originally from South Africa, Emile Ferreira is an entrepreneur and machine learning researcher who recently earned an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. He is the co-founder of Verascient, a startup tackling the challenge of AI hallucination. During his time at Cambridge, Emile participated in the Founders at the University of Cambridge initiative, a programme that connects entrepreneurial students, researchers, and alumni to form co-founding teams and launch innovative startups. With the next application deadline approaching on Friday, 31 October, Emile shared his insights and experiences of life as an entrepreneur.

Your journey to Cambridge

Can you tell us about your personal journey to Cambridge and what life for you looked like before you joined the University?

I learnt to type on my dad’s laptop before I could write, and taught myself programming at 12 years old. I used these skills to build websites for friends, family and, soon, local businesses. While in high school in South Africa, I joined Replit (now valued at over $3B) as one of its first hires. I attended class during the day and worked nights remotely. This was ultimately unsustainable, but it reaffirmed my conviction to build my own company. Outside of class, I taught myself machine learning from first principles and developed the world’s first on-device artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for Android. For this, I was awarded Best Breakthrough Developer at the 2018 MTN App of the Year Awards and appeared in an interview on live national television before graduating high school.

I attended Stellenbosch University from 2019, where I read for an undergraduate degree in mathematical sciences. During this time, I led a team of six to successfully undertake a student project for Amazon Web Services, I was awarded for placing second in my class of 400, and my friends and I won the Stellenbosch University hackathon by developing a mobile banking app which creates a Bluetooth Low Energy mesh network to facilitate offline transactions. We presented our solution to the executive board of Capitec Bank. In 2022, I took a year off from my studies, which I spent contributing to open-source projects and volunteering at Camphill Farm Community Hermanus. I then returned to Stellenbosch University for an honours degree in computer science. While there, I worked as Head Teaching Assistant for a course of 176 students, played for the university tennis team and was recognised as the Best Computer Science Honours Student, in a class of 52.

During my honours studies, I applied to the University of Cambridge and various scholarships. While waiting to come to St Edmund’s College on the Skye Foundation and Oppenheimer Memorial Trust scholarships, I continued to work as an external researcher for Stellenbosch University and collaborated with the Formal Languages and Neural Networks (FLaNN) research group. My work focused on classifying the expressive power of Transformer models using formal language theory.

What motivated you to become an entrepreneur?

When I discovered programming, I was inspired by how my solutions could instantly scale to reach millions of people. This spark was recognised and fostered by the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Fellowship, which funded my studies at Stellenbosch University and provided me with four years of entrepreneurial education. I see entrepreneurship as a vehicle to turn my research into real-world solutions and to maximise my impact.

Was there a particular moment or experience that inspired your startup idea?

I was initially building an end-to-end encrypted AI platform for businesses in regulated industries. When I took my MVP to potential customers, they said that it solves one of their big concerns – data privacy – but that there is an even bigger reason preventing them from using AI: they can’t trust it.

What problem is your startup solving, and why is it important to you?

Large language models have a tendency to invent false but plausible-sounding information, known as a hallucination or confabulation. These hallucinations can lead to severe consequences in accuracy-critical domains: legal, finance, healthcare, etc. Verascient is building the trust layer that intercepts hallucinations, and enables businesses in regulated and accuracy-critical domains to safely adopt AI. We are working to protect the integrity of information in the AI age. As a researcher, the integrity of information is deeply important to me.

How did you hear about Founders and how did Founders play a role in your entrepreneurial journey?

I found a flyer in the Computer Laboratory, advertising the SYNC programme. The programme looked like a great fit for me, but I didn’t have time to read the flyer as I rushed on with my day. It was only at 5:00 the following morning – when I woke up for rowing – that I saw that the application was due in just a few hours! I rushed to complete it and submitted it later that morning. I’m so glad that I got my application in, because Founders at the University of Cambridge has been pivotal to my entrepreneurial journey. The SYNC programme gave me the space, community and expertise I needed to turn my research into a company.

What has been your toughest challenge so far, and how did you overcome it?

My greatest challenge in building Verascient has been registering the company in the United Kingdom (UK). As a South African citizen studying in Cambridge on a student visa, I was not permitted to register a company during my studies and had to wait until my visa expired after leaving the UK. To register as a non-resident, I needed to use a company formation agent that could provide a UK address. However, we were rejected by two agents because South Africans are considered high-risk clients. When I finally found an agent willing to assist, I had trouble verifying my identity with Companies House, as their system assumes passports have biometric chips—something South African passports lack. If these are the challenges faced in completing something as simple as company registration, it’s easy to imagine the additional hurdles that foreign founders may encounter at later stages. Each of these points of friction distracts from a startup’s core goal: building a great product and finding customers. I hope this process becomes more accessible for foreign founders in the future, to better foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the UK.

What’s been your proudest moment as a founder?

I won twice at the App of the Year Awards, before graduating high school. In 2017, I grew interested in machine learning and started building rudimentary language models. I was amazed by the capabilities of Google Assistant, but I had concerns about privacy and limited internet access at my home in South Africa. To solve this, I used my language models to create the world’s first on-device AI assistant: Bestee. With more than 200k downloads, Bestee was recognised as the most innovative app in Africa, and I was awarded Best Breakthrough Developer at the 2018 MTN App of the Year Awards.

How do you see your startup impacting the world in the long term?

AI is undoubtedly changing the world. It is being touted as the fifth industrial revolution—the cognitive industrial revolution. I see Verascient unlocking the full economic potential of AI – by making its output factually reliable – and helping to protect the integrity of information on the internet. I see this not only for human-agent interactions, but also for agent-agent interactions, as these become the dominant communication traffic.