Female-founded London AI startup Etiq AI snaps €900K to build the copilot every scientist needs

Etiq AI, a female-founded AI-startup based in London, has snapped up €900K in seed funding led by GapMinder VC, following previous grant funding of £1 million from InnovateUK. With this, the total funding raised by the startup to date accounts for £2.5 million.

Responding to TFN, Etiq AI said: “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.”Meet the visionary founders Etiq AI was founded in 2019 by Iris Anson and Raluca Crisan.



Raluca has nearly 15 years of experience in data science and machine learning, working with a diverse range of clients. Before Etiq, she served as Director of Data Science at Merkle. Before joining Merkle, she was part of the leadership team at Aquila Insights, a specialist analytics and machine learning start-up acquired by the Merkle Group, a private marketing group generating $ 2 billion in revenue per year.

In the past, Raluca built the global analytics and data science team for a mobile marketing company as it successfully listed on NASDAQ, and she co-founded another machine learning startup.On the other hand, Iris has a strong background in technology and a degree in Mathematics and Business Studies from the University of Warwick, coupled with a certification in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. Before Etiq, she started her career as an advisor in the financial services industry, then spent five years as a sole founder building and growing her first tech startup, selling to thousands of customers, covering functions such as operations, sales, and leading tech development.

Additionally, Iris was born into a business-oriented family, and she quickly proved to be a natural entrepreneur. From an early age, Iris has helped out and managed family businesses, thus developing her entrepreneurial acumen. How was the idea born? Many tools available to data scientists haven’t been built for this world; they’re tools that Software engineers have been using, or they’re overly focused on one development area.

Etiq is so much more. Talking on how the idea was born, Etiq AI said: “We started Etiq because we saw first-hand how difficult it was to build robust and reliable machine learning pipelines. Data Scientists were spending too much time debugging their code and not enough time doing what they do best, building innovations and solving problems.

However, all the apparent solutions out there were either trying to co-opt and utilise another tool that wasn’t built for Data Scientists, or they missed a huge swathe of the work that goes into building ML models and pipelines. So we set out to change that.”The company added: “We built Etiq from the ground up to answer the question, how can we make developing and debugging ML models and pipelines easy for Data Scientists.

We stripped back that question to find three core issues that they’re struggling with and managing code and data together, and understanding how they interact. Knowing how to ensure your ML models and pipelines are robust and fair when deployed. And finally, having to debug and fix your pipelines once in production.

”Tackling the pain points of data scienceEtiq AI emerged from the Zinc VC Mission 2 accelerator, focused initially on mitigating bias in AI systems. Over time, the startup’s mission evolved to address a broader challenge that affects nearly every data science team: the time-consuming and complex process of debugging and productionising AI pipelines.Data, code and their interactions are all first-class citizens and considered together.

Etiq AI has built its lineage, testing recommendations and RCA agents so that for DS, developing your models doesn’t have to be hard and debugging your code doesn’t take weeks, it takes hours or even minutes.Their newly launched flagship product, the “Data Science Copilot,” is designed to reduce debugging time from weeks to minutes. Launched in March 2025, this platform provides deep code visibility, intelligently recommends tests for pipeline robustness, and uses RCA (Root Cause Analysis) agents to track and resolve issues in code logic.

The tool also offers a 30-day free trial for organisations and data scientists keen to strengthen the reliability and fairness of their AI systems.What makes Etiq AI stand out?Talking about competition, Etiq AI stacks up against AI and ML testing tools such as Evidently, Fiddler, Arize, NannyML and so on. However, its technology has a much broader remit.

In an increasingly crowded field of AI infrastructure startups, Etiq AI stands out with its laser focus on post-training validation, a critical yet often overlooked phase in machine learning development. While most tools support model training or data labelling, Etiq operates in the last mile, ensuring that models not only work but are robust, fair, and explainable before deployment.Etiq is not just a product company.

It is building a robust ecosystem for AI quality assurance, a growing need as regulations around AI bias, transparency, and safety continue to tighten.What’s next? The company will continue to grow the business and the team as it scales, and looks forward to being the first place that data scientists turn to when developing, debugging, and deploying ML and AI models and pipelines.With solid funding, a sharp focus on a real industry pain point, and an experienced founding team, Etiq AI is poised for long-term impact.

As enterprises rush to integrate AI into their operations, the need for tools that ensure reliability, fairness, and compliance becomes increasingly essential. Etiq’s Copilot could become an industry standard for AI testing, making it a startup to watch in the years to come.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 is an urgent need for robust tools that help developers monitor, debug, and improve model behaviour 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.

”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,t and this is just the beginning.”The post Female-founded London AI startup Etiq AI snaps €900K to build the copilot every scientist needs appeared first on Tech Funding News..