- Zerops has raised $2M in seed funding, led by Gi21 Capital
- The Czech startup operates on its own bare-metal infrastructure instead of renting from AWS, enabling costs that are up to four times lower than those of competitors
- A new AI control panel integrates coding agents such as Claude and Codex directly with live cloud infrastructure
Prague-based cloud platform Zerops raised a $2M seed round led by Gi21 Capital to eliminate the gap between development and production environments, ensuring code behaves identically whether built locally or deployed at scale.
“Most platforms ask you to trust that development and production are close enough. We removed the gap entirely by rethinking how cloud architecture should work from the ground up,†says AleÅ¡ RechtorÃk, co-founder and CEO of Zerops, tells Tech Funding News.
As AI coding tools become mainstream, the challenge grows: 45% of developers report that debugging AI-generated code takes longer than writing it, mainly because AI operates in sandboxed environments that do not reflect real systems.
RechtorÃk and Jan Saidl developed Zerops as the lead team at Via Hosting, a Czech provider supporting infrastructure for about half of the Czech and Slovak e-commerce. After the project was sold to German cloud company Contabo, it was discontinued due to corporate restructuring. RechtorÃk later reacquired the project and spent over a year fundraising during the post-2022 VC downturn before relaunching it independently at the end of 2024.
The startup runs all applications within a unified project environment, eliminating separation between development and production. Code is built, tested, and deployed under identical conditions from the start, reducing delays in production launches. Consistent infrastructure enables production-ready deployment with a single click, rather than weeks of configuration.
Unlike most PaaS competitors like Render, Fly.io, and Railway, Zerops runs on its own bare-metal infrastructure rather than renting capacity from AWS. This cost structure lets it price up to four times lower than legacy cloud platforms. Applications run in full Linux containers with real-time process visibility. The platform includes over 15 built-in services compared to the two or three offered by most rivals.
“AWS solved one problem but created another — you just swapped DevOps engineers for AWS experts. PaaS platforms then overcorrected, becoming black boxes. We’re going back to the middle,†says RechtorÃk.
The company’s new panel connects AI coding agents, including Claude, Codex, and Gemini, directly to a live Zerops project, so agents build and debug within the actual production environment rather than in isolation. The idea is that code produced by AI is production-ready from the start, not something that needs to be untangled after the fact.
“We’re moving from millions of developers to millions of developers working alongside AI agents. Most platforms weren’t designed for either of these changes. Zerops was. Its economics come from owning the full stack, and its architecture works because it never abstracts away the underlying infrastructure,†says Damir Å poljariÄ, founder of Gi21 Capital.
The investment will primarily support distribution efforts, including developer marketing, open-source sponsorships, hackathons, conference participation, and creator partnerships.
The team currently has 12 members, with two more hires in progress. Zerops operates a European data centre, recently launched a US East region, and plans to open US West and Singapore data centres in the coming months.
