We're thrilled to announce that Zerve has closed a $7.6 million seed funding round, led by Paladin Capital Group, with participation from existing investor Elkstone and angels including former Executive Vice President of Engineering at DataRobot, Rob Hickey. This significant milestone marks a major step forward in our mission to elevate the impact of data teams with our innovative data science and AI development platform.

Established in 2021, Zerve is on a mission to elevate the impact of AI and data workflows by providing a unique, developer-centric platform based on its filed-patent architecture that guarantees resilience and scalability.

Today, the efficiency and measurable impact of code-first data teams are becoming more scrutinized within enterprises. Many AI and data workflows that could have transformative effects on organizations do not leave the development stage. Those that do have to overcome many hurdles including deployment handovers to separate development and engineering teams, and issues with version control, reproducibility, and cloud infrastructure. 

Zerve’s end-to-end platform provides a robust environment that simplifies the building, managing and deployment of these workflows. By automating away the challenges and complexities that face code-first data teams, Zerve enables them to significantly reduce cycle times and maximise ROI. With features like automated infrastructure management, language interoperability, robust version controls, package management and deployment processes, Zerve is uniquely positioned to power the next wave of high-performing data teams to maximise their impact and reach their true potential.

Zerve raised $3.8m in pre-seed funding in October 2023 led by Elkstone, and commercially launched its product in February of this year. It has successfully onboarded elite code-first data teams in major organisations globally to help them cut cycle times by up to 9x, with over 4,000 users signing up to its free product tier in just three months. The startup is led by three co-founders: Phily Hayes (CEO & Co-founder), formerly at LearnUpon; Jason Hilary (CTO & Co-founder), who brings AI/ML experience from Siren and Antares Vision; and Dr Greg Michaelson (CPO & Co-founder) – previously Chief Customer Officer at DataRobot.

Phily said: “The stick we measure ourselves by is how much more throughput the teams we’re working with have been able to achieve, whether that is reducing their overall cycle time for projects or increasing their speed to recommendations. The speed at which data and AI projects run can sometimes feel like death by 1,000 cuts, so on-top of our 100% guaranteed, resilience-based architecture, we have cleared the path-to-output by removing the smaller hurdles that get in the way.” 

Ken Pentimonti, Managing Director, Paladin Capital Group added: “The limitations of current solutions have placed a big barrier in front of innovation at organizations seeking to realise the potential of data science and AI. Zerve’s intuitive platform can release that potential and improve the safety and reliability of the software ultimately deployed. With spend on AI at $33Bn in 2023 in Europe alone, growing 30% per year, we are hugely excited about Zerve’s prospects.”

With this strategic funding, Zerve is poised to accelerate its research and development efforts and expand its reach to empower even more high-performing data teams. We're excited about the future of code-first data science, and we're committed to providing the tools and platform to revolutionize how AI is developed and deployed. Zerve was advised by Capnua Corporate Finance and RDJ on the transaction.