Irish start-up Zerve has secured $3.8 million in pre-seed funding to bolster its research and development capabilities, as well as expand its staff. The company, headquartered in Tipperary and 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.
The goal of the platform is to allow data scientists to work together simultaneously, promoting exploratory data analysis and the development of production-quality code. Mr. Hayes described Zerve’s architectural vision as one that breaks down silos between data science and AI development, allowing for real-time collaboration on projects. 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 harness the power of these fields. 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.
Zerve was founded to address a productivity hindrance identified by Mr. Hayes: the fragmented nature of tools available to data scientists for sharing code and results with colleagues. 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 by providing a cloud-based serverless environment that enhances live collaboration