London-based AI startup Etiq AI, founded by Iris Anson and Raluca Crisan, has secured €900,000 in fresh seed funding to supercharge the development of its AI copilot tool for data scientists. This round, led by GapMinder VC, builds on earlier backing that includes a £1 million InnovateUK grant—bringing the company’s total funding to £2.5 million.
Etiq AI plans to use the new capital to enhance its AI-driven product suite. The startup is focused on making machine learning (ML) development and debugging faster, easier, and more reliable. Alongside product innovation, the funding will support team expansion and commercial growth efforts throughout 2025.
Founded in 2019, Etiq AI is tackling one of the most overlooked problems in machine learning—how to efficiently debug, validate, and deploy models in production. While many AI tools center on training models or managing datasets, Etiq AI is carving out a niche in post-training quality assurance, helping teams deliver fairer, more explainable AI systems.
Behind the Vision: Meet the Founders
Etiq AI is the brainchild of two experienced entrepreneurs. Raluca Crisan brings nearly 15 years of experience in data science and machine learning, having led data teams at Merkle and Aquila Insights. She also helped scale a mobile marketing company to a successful NASDAQ listing and co-founded a prior machine learning venture.
Iris Anson, meanwhile, holds a degree in Mathematics and Business Studies from the University of Warwick and studied Artificial Intelligence at Oxford’s Said Business School. Before Etiq AI, she launched her own tech company as a solo founder, managing everything from sales to technical development. Growing up in a business-driven family, Iris honed her entrepreneurial instincts early on.
The two founders saw firsthand the pain points data scientists faced—hours wasted debugging ML pipelines with tools that weren’t built for the job. This frustration sparked the idea behind Etiq AI: to build a platform tailored for data science teams needing robust, efficient workflows.
Why Etiq AI Exists
The startup didn’t emerge from theory—it was born from real experience. The team noticed that existing tools either repurposed developer-centric platforms or focused too narrowly on specific pipeline stages. According to the founders, none addressed the full lifecycle of building and monitoring ML systems.
So, they went back to the basics. Etiq AI’s mission is to help data scientists manage their code and data side by side, understand their interactions, and catch issues before they become production nightmares. From mitigating bias to ensuring fairness and explainability, the platform targets real-world complexity—not just theoretical use cases.
From Zinc VC to Real Impact
Etiq AI’s journey began in the Zinc VC Mission 2 accelerator, where its initial focus was reducing algorithmic bias. But the team soon realized the broader challenge facing ML teams: how to make debugging less of a slog and more of a science. Their flagship solution, the Data Science Copilot, launched in March 2025, is their answer.
The tool gives data scientists deep visibility into their code, recommends robustness tests, and deploys Root Cause Analysis (RCA) agents to uncover and fix issues in minutes rather than weeks. For organisations looking to improve model reliability and compliance, Etiq AI now offers a 30-day free trial to try it out.
Standing Out in a Crowded AI Market
While rivals like Arize, Fiddler, Evidently, and NannyML focus on model monitoring or testing, Etiq AI zooms in on the last stretch of the machine learning journey—the part where real problems tend to surface. Their edge lies in their holistic view of AI development: data, code, fairness, and reliability are all treated as first-class components.
This broader approach, coupled with increasing global pressure for AI regulation and fairness, positions Etiq AI as more than a product company. It’s aiming to become the standard for AI quality assurance.
What’s Next for Etiq AI?
With new funding in hand and a growing user base, Etiq AI is poised for rapid growth. The startup plans to keep expanding its team, roll out more LLM-focused features, and deepen its commercial reach across Europe and beyond.
GapMinder’s Investment Director, Robert Herscovici, said the firm sees Etiq AI as building a critical layer in the AI ecosystem. With AI agents and ML tools rapidly proliferating, he highlighted the need for platforms that empower developers to identify bias, monitor edge cases, and improve system performance continuously.
Echoing this optimism, co-founder Iris Anson shared her excitement about the next phase: “This funding round is a huge milestone for us. We’re excited to scale faster, deliver even more value to our users, and continue building the future of responsible AI—one debugging copilot at a time.”
As AI adoption soars, the spotlight on fairness, compliance, and reliability is only growing brighter. AI startup Etiq AI is well-positioned to become the trusted partner every data science team turns to.
