In a bid to enhance its research and development capabilities, Irish start-up Zerve has secured $3.8 million in pre-seed funding. Headquartered in Tipperary and founded in 2021 by Phily Hayes, Jason Hillary, and Greg Michaelson, the company is 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’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 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.

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,