A female-founded AI-startup based in London has raised £766k in seed funding led by GapMinder VC, following previous grant funding of £1m from Innovate UK.
Etiq AI will use the funding to scale its newly launched “Data Science Copilot”, a platform designed to radically accelerate debugging and testing for machine learning models.
It will also be used to develop product features that further automate testing and debugging whilst providing further capabilities in the LLM space, and on expanding the team and furthering commercial marketing through 2025.
Co-founders Iris Anson and Raluca Crisan have been building on their rich experience in ML and AI testing by 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.
The company’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.
“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,” said Anson.
“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.”
Robert Herscovici, investment director at GapMinder, added: “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.”