Prague’s Zerops raises €1.7 million to close the gap between development and production in cloud infrastructure

Zerops, a Prague-based platform-as-a-service startup redesigning cloud architecture, has raised a €1.7 million ($2 million) Seed round led by Gi21 Capital to expand its global infrastructure in the US and Asia, accelerate product development, and grow its team.

The funding will support expansion into Asia and North America, including scaling infrastructure in the United States and opening a new data centre in Singapore.

Damir Špoljarič, founder of Gi21 Capital, said, “The market is reaching an inflection point. Rising cloud costs are forcing a shift, while AI is changing not just how software is written, but who is building and running it. 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.”

Zerops was founded in 2021 by Aleš Rechtorík and Jan Saidl as a vshosting.eu spin‑off. The company removes the separation between development and production environments, a long-standing flaw in cloud architecture that causes deployment failures for developers and AI coding agents alike.

The company notes that developing and managing software in the cloud remains both complex and expensive. It cites Gartner’s forecast that global cloud expenditure will hit €617.5 million ($723 billion) by 2025, but highlights that developers devote just 16% of their time to coding, while the remaining effort is spent on infrastructure and tools. 

According to Zerops, a core issue is that development and production environments are fundamentally different, so applications that work in one often fail in the other.

“At the same time, simpler platforms abstract away critical system visibility, while more powerful solutions require significant operational expertise. The rise of AI coding tools is adding further strain, with 45% of developers reporting that debugging AI-generated code takes more time than writing it themselves, often because this code is built in environments that do not match real systems,” mentioned the company in the press release.

Zerops claims to create a unified environment where applications behave identically from development through to production, enabling reliable deployments from the start. It states that on its platform, there are no environment tiers; applications run within a single project where code behaves the same way, regardless of scale. 

This means developers build, test, and deploy in genuinely identical conditions, eliminating an entire category of deployment failures. The startup points out that because the infrastructure is consistent from the start, deploying a production-ready system requires a single click, not weeks of configuration.

Zerops is built on its own infrastructure, with data centres across Europe and the United States. It runs applications in full Linux containers, not restricted app containers, giving developers the same level of access as on their own machines, including real-time visibility and control over running processes. 

The platform also includes more than 15 built-in services such as databases, search engines, and messaging systems, reducing the need for external integrations compared to the typical two or three offered by most platforms. As applications grow, they remain within a single environment, removing the need to re-architect infrastructure at scale, says Zerops. 

Aleš Rechtorík, co-founder and CEO of Zerops, said, “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. That’s the same guarantee we now give AI coding agents, and it’s why the code they produce is production-ready from the first deployment. What works once continues to work as applications scale. Our goal is to make running software predictable, not something teams have to constantly debug.”

The company is also introducing Zerops Control Panel (ZCP), a feature designed for AI-driven development. ZCP connects AI coding agents, such as Claude, Codex, or Gemini, directly to real cloud infrastructure within a Zerops project, enabling them to build, deploy, and debug applications in real-world conditions rather than in isolated environments. 

Since AI operates within the same environment as production, the generated code functions immediately. Developers can work alongside AI in the same workspace, reviewing and modifying outputs with their preferred tools.

Zerops aims to become one of the primary cloud platforms used by developers globally, focusing on delivering infrastructure that balances control, transparency, and cost, for both human developers and AI agents.

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