South African Startup Launches AI With 10M Token Memory

Imagine an AI that could read every contract your company ever signed, remember all of it, and answer questions about the whole stack in seconds. That future just arrived from an unexpected place.

Refiant AI, a startup founded in South Africa, launched Protea this week. The new artificial intelligence model can process up to 10 million tokens (roughly 7.5 million words) in a single conversation without forgetting what it read.

To put that in perspective, most AI tools on the market today max out at 500,000 tokens. Google's premium Gemini service offers one million tokens to paying customers. Protea is offering 10 times that capacity, and anyone can use it for free right now.

The company released three versions of Protea with memory capacities of one million, five million, and 10 million tokens. No waitlist. No approval process. Just sign up and start building.

"Customers don't need more waitlists," said Mathew Haswell, who co-founded Refiant with Viroshan Naicker and Siddharth Gutta in 2025. "They need models they can test, break, and build with."

The practical applications could transform how people work. A legal team could upload hundreds of contracts and ask questions about all of them at once. Insurance companies could analyze years of claims data in a single conversation. Software developers could feed their entire codebase into the system and get instant answers about how everything connects.

Refiant raised $5 million three months ago to make AI systems run more efficiently and cost less. Protea represents their first major product since that funding round.

The Ripple Effect

This launch matters beyond the impressive technical specs. By making powerful AI freely available, Refiant is lowering the barrier for smaller companies and individuals who couldn't afford premium enterprise tools.

The timing also puts African innovation on the global AI map. While Silicon Valley giants compete on incremental improvements, a South Africa-founded team just leapfrogged the competition by 10 times. They're proving that breakthrough innovation can come from anywhere.

The company isn't stopping here either. Refiant has already built an internal prototype that processes 100 million tokens and plans two more product releases this year. They're working on bringing that next-level technology to market soon.

For now, thousands of developers, researchers, and businesses worldwide can access AI capabilities that didn't exist commercially until this week, and they're building the future together without barriers.