London, April 30, 2025
Etiq AI, the female-founded AI-startup based in London, UK, today announced it has raised €900,000 in seed funding led by GapMinder VC, following previous grant funding of £1million from InnovateUK, and will be used to scale its newly launched “Data Science Copilot”, a platform designed to radically accelerate debugging and testing for machine learning models.
With data science platform revenues expected to exceed $320 billion by 2026, tools that improve developer productivity are drawing increasing interest. Etiq joins a growing field of AI infrastructure startups, but differentiates by focusing on post-training robustness and fairness.
Founded by Iris Anson (CEO) and Raluca Crisan (CTO), Etiq AI has been building on their rich heritage in ML and AI testing by really digging into what makes debugging code and productionising pipelines so hard for Data Scientists. This led to the development and launch of Etiq’s Data Science Copilot in March 2025. Built from the ground up to answer the question “how can we take the time taken to debug ML and AI pipelines from weeks to minutes”.
Etiq’s core features provide deep visibility into the logical flow of AI and ML code, recommend the right tests to make pipelines robust and enable RCA agents that can navigate through code to identify where issues arise and suggest how to fix them. The startup is offering a 30-day free trial for Data Scientists and organizations looking to strengthen their AI capabilities.
Robert Herscovici, Investment Director at GapMinder, said “We’re incredibly excited to back the team at Etiq as they build a foundational layer for responsible and scalable AI. With the surge in AI agent usage and machine learning-driven applications, there’s an urgent need for robust tools that help developers monitor, debug, and improve model behavior in real time. Etiq’s technology does exactly that—empowering teams to surface hidden biases, identify edge cases, and continuously improve ML performance. The founders bring a rare combination of technical depth and product vision, and we have strong conviction in their vision to become a category-defining company in the AI tooling space.”
The funding will be used to develop product features that further automate testing and debugging whilst providing further capabilities in the LLM space. In addition Etiq will be expanding the team and furthering commercial marketing through 2025.
Iris Anson said “We’re thrilled to announce the successful completion of our latest funding round and to officially welcome GapMinder VC on board as a key partner in our journey. This milestone marks a significant step forward for our team and product, and we’re incredibly excited about the road ahead. With GapMinder’s support and shared vision, we’re ready to accelerate growth, scale innovation, and deliver even more value to our users. The future is bright and this is just the beginning.”
For more information on Etiq’s 30-day free trial, or to sign up, visit: https://www.etiq.ai/
Press enquiries:
Chris Billingham: chris@etiq.ai
About Etiq AI:
Etiq AI, founded in 2019, originated from the Zinc VC Mission 2 accelerator program and was initially created to address bias in AI models, helping organisations develop fairer and more transparent AI systems. Over time, Etiq AI evolved into a full Data Science Copilot, ensuring that debugging has never been easier for Data Science teams, and AI pipelines are robust, explainable, and compliant.
About GapMinder:
GapMinder Ventures is a venture capital company that invests in technology startups created in Romania and Eastern Europe (in particular in the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria), in Seed or Late Seed stage and rapidly growing internationally. GapMinder takes a hands-on approach as an investor, helping companies with strategic advice and involvement in organizational scaling, financial discipline, corporate governance and development. GapMinder manages two funds.
With the first fund having a total capitalization of €50m, GapMinder has invested in companies including Druid.AI, FintechOS, TypingDNA, Veridion, Siena.Cx, Cyscale, Deepstash, SmartDreamers, Machinations, Frisbo, Innoship.io.
GapMinder Fund II was launched in 2024 with a target capital of €80 million.
The EIF supported GapMinder Fund II through two initiatives: the European Union’s InvestEU program and the Recovery Fund – part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, co-funded by the EU through Next GenerationEU.