Refiant AI, a South Africa-founded startup that uses algorithms to compress artificial intelligence models, has launched Protea, a family of large language models the company says can process up to 10 million tokens in a single prompt.
The models can process and retain significantly more information at once before generating a response, the company said. Protea comes in three versions with context windows of one million, five million and 10 million tokens, and can be accessed free through Refiant’s platform without a waitlist or approval process.
The launch comes three months after Refiant closed a $5 million seed round led by VoLo Earth Ventures to expand its AI optimization platform and deepen research partnerships. Protea is Refiant’s first major product launch since the raise, and the first of three planned releases.
“Customers don’t need more waitlists,” said Mathew Haswell, Refiant AI’s cofounder. “They need models they can test, break and build with. Protea is live, and we want people to use it from day one.”
Founded in 2025 by Haswell, Viroshan Naicker and Siddharth Gutta, Refiant AI is building machine learning systems that reduce compute costs and improve model efficiency.
According to the company, Protea’s largest version can hold roughly 7.5 million words at maximum capacity, allowing users to analyze large volumes of information without splitting it into smaller chunks. Refiant said that scale of context could allow legal teams to review hundreds of contracts in a single pass, insurers to analyze years of claims data, and engineering teams to process entire software codebases.
The release lands as AI companies increasingly compete to expand how much information their models can handle in a single prompt. Anthropic’s Claude supports context windows of up to 500,000 tokens on certain Enterprise offerings, while Google’s Gemini offers up to one million tokens on its higher-tier plans. Refiant is betting that a larger AI memory will give enterprises an edge when working with large datasets.
“Long-context AI has been talked about for over a year now, but hasn’t really been commercially available,” said Naicker, Refiant’s chief executive and cofounder.
The company said it has already demonstrated an internal prototype capable of processing up to 100 million tokens, and is exploring how to benchmark and bring that technology into production.
