Irish Data Science and AI Start-up Zerve Secures $3.8m in Pre-Seed Funding

Irish start-up Zerve, which specializes in data science and artificial intelligence, has secured $3.8 million in pre-seed funding to bolster its research and development capabilities. The company is also planning to expand its staff, doubling its current team of 12 over the next year to support its engineering, cloud infrastructure, and research and development teams. Zerve, 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. Zerve’s co-founder Mr. Hayes described the company’s architectural vision as one that promotes exploratory data analysis and the development of production-quality code. He believes that data science should transition from a solo pursuit to a multiplayer endeavor, 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 startups for the Intel Ignite Accelerator program which is tailored for deep-tech companies.

Mr. Hayes identified fragmentation in tools available to data scientists for sharing code