Irish start-up Zerve has secured $3.8 million in pre-seed funding to enhance its research and development capabilities. The company, founded in 2021 by Phily Hayes, Jason Hillary, and Greg Michaelson, is headquartered in Tipperary and specializes in data science and artificial intelligence.

The platform developed by Zerve aims to facilitate collaboration among data science and AI development teams. This cloud-based serverless environment enables live collaboration and the creation of stable production code. Co-founder Mr. Hayes described Zerve’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, similar to Figma’s approach for design, which allows designers to collaborate in real-time.

Zerve’s pre-seed round was led by Elkstone Ventures 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 and emphasized the potential for its technology to break down silos and harness the power of AI and data science. In addition, Zerve has been selected as one of the 10 European startups for the Intel Ignite Accelerator program, tailored for deep-tech companies.

Mr. Hayes identified the fragmented nature of tools available to data scientists for sharing code and results with colleagues as a productivity hindrance. He believes that a unified platform like Zerve’s can address this issue effectively, enabling teams to work together seamlessly. With its new funding, Zerve will double its current team size over the next year while expanding its engineering, cloud infrastructure, and research and development teams to support its growth plans