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

Zerve’s platform facilitates collaboration among data science and AI development teams by providing a cloud-based serverless environment that enhances live collaboration and the creation of stable production code. 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.

The funding from the pre-seed round will allow Zerve to realize its ambition of bridging the gap between data science and AI development. Elkstone Ventures led the 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 potential 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. Mr. Hayes identified the fragmented nature of tools available to data scientists for sharing code and results with colleagues as a productivity hindrance. He hinted at the need for a unified platform like Zerve’s to address this issue.