Irish start-up Zerve has secured $3.8 million in pre-seed funding to bolster its research and development capabilities and expand its team. The company, founded in 2021 by Phily Hayes, Jason Hillary, and Greg Michaelson, has developed a platform that facilitates collaboration among data science and AI development teams.
Zerve’s co-founder described the company’s architectural vision as one that promotes exploratory data analysis and the development of production-quality code. The goal is to allow data scientists to work together simultaneously, much like what Figma did for design by allowing designers to collaborate in real-time. The funding from the pre-seed round provides Zerve with the opportunity to realize and capitalize on its vision.
Elkstone Ventures led the pre-seed round, with contributions from angel investors including Algolia CTO Sean Mullaney and former DataRobot EVP of engineering Rob Hickey. Niall McEvoy, partner at Elkstone Ventures, praised Zerve’s ambition to bridge the gap between data science and AI development, emphasizing the potential for its technology to break down silos and harness the power of AI and data science. Zerve has also been selected as one of the 10 European start-ups for the Intel Ignite Accelerator program, which is tailored for deep-tech companies.
The fragmented nature of tools available to data scientists for sharing code and results with colleagues has been identified as a productivity hindrance by Mr. Hayes. He hinted at the need for a unified platform like Zerve’s to address this issue, and the company is positioned to do exactly that. With its cloud-based serverless environment enhancing live collaboration and stable production code creation, Zerve’s platform can help streamline data science workflows and improve team productivity.