Tipperary startup Zerve raises €3.5m in funding led by Elkstone
Niall McEvoy (Venture Partner, Elkstone), Greg Michaelson (co-founder, Zerve), Jason Hillary (co-founder, Zerve), Phily Hayes (co-founder, Zerve)
Tipperary data science startup Zerve has raised $3.8m (€3.47m) in its pre-seed funding to build a new architecture for data science and AI development.
Elkstone Ventures, which has backed Flipdish, LetsGetChecked and Manna led the funding round, with contributions from angel investors, including Sean Mullaney, CTO of Algolia and Rob Hickey, former EVP of Engineering at DataRobot.
Zerve was co-founded in 2021 by college friends Phily Hayes (ex-LearnUpon and Deloitte) and Jason Hillary, PhD, Engineering, and later joined by Greg Michaelson, former Chief Customer Officer of DataRobot. The company is currently one of ten startups chosen from Europe to participate in Intel’s Ignite Accelerator program for deep-tech companies. Since 2019, the 148 companies that have gone through the programme have raised over €1.6bn.
Zerve currently has 12 employees and aims to hire across engineering, cloud infrastructure, and research and development. The company has created a coding platform tailored for data science and AI development that allows teams to collaborate and share their outputs more easily.
Phily Hayes, CEO & co-founder of Zerve said: "Data scientists have never really been able to seamlessly share both their code and their results with their colleagues. The existing tools available are fragmented. It makes it hard to be productive. With Zerve, all the teams can collaborate live and build something stable enough to deploy."
Niall McEvoy, Partner at Elkstone Ventures said, “Zerve has an ambitious vision of bridging the gap between data science and AI development. The team has built a technology that will really allow companies to break down silos and harness the power of AI and data science and has the potential to do to data science what Figma did for design”.
