Czech startup Zerops raised $500k from Presto Ventures and Gi21 Capital
As a spin-off from VSHosting, the largest Central European provider of managed hosting services, Zerops raised a $500k pre-seed round from Presto Ventures and Gi21 Capital.
Zerops is a developer-first PaaS (Platform as a Service) that offers a unified environment for projects of any size and complexity across all stages of the application development lifecycle. By incorporating best development practices and offering guided paths, Zerops simplifies the development process, empowering solo developers and small—to medium-sized teams to create great applications confidently.
When developers use Zerops, they don’t need to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure – like networking, databases, storage or server maintenance. Instead, they can focus on writing code, which is the truly creative and valuable part of their work.
In 2023, the cloud computing market has reached $270 billion in revenue, with around 20% year-on-year growth. Up to 73% of the market is captured by the big cloud players – such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud – while other computing solutions (traditional VPS / VDS / dedicated hosting and PaaS) account for approx. 21% of the market.
Under the hood, Zerops manages a robust infrastructure for each project. This custom setup has abilities similar to the popular open-source orchestration platform Kubernetes, but without any of the hassle. Zerops’ auto-scaling capabilities ensure that production environments always have the necessary resources to perform optimally, regardless of scale.
At the same time, Zerops allows non-production environments to be set up identically to production while keeping costs in check through fine-grained resource configuration. The goal is to eliminate the dreaded ‘but it works on my machine’ situations.
The team behind Zerops builds on nearly two decades of managed services expertise and know-how from VSHosting, the world’s largest Central European provider. It is supported by Contabo Group with global infrastructure across Europe, the USA, Singapore, Japan, as well as India.
The goal of Zerops is to simplify the life and work of developers with a straightforward premise: every programmer should have their own environment, and every environment should be as similar as possible to the production environment.
To accomplish this, Zerops combines the PaaS model, suitable for running production applications, with modern approaches to cloud development (Gitpod, GitHub Codespaces), which are effective for fast and unified environment setup – yet, quite often, they only shift the aforementioned issue of ‘but it works on my machine’ to a ‘but it works in the cloud dev environment’ situation.
The team invested three years of development and millions of euros to unlock this challenge and achieve such a balanced combination of features. Zerops must be built from scratch to control all aspects, from hardware to application orchestration.
The result is a developer-first platform that aims to improve their lives and win over thousands of active users within two years, becoming one of the serious competitors in the modern PaaS space.
The concept is based on 4 key pillars – it’s their combination that makes everything possible:
- Fine-grained resource configuration and auto-scaling: This level of precision ensures applications always have the optimal resources they need, without the overprovisioning or underperformance often seen with other hosting solutions. It also allows for setups that are identical across environments, with only differences in resource allocation.
- A custom underlying project infrastructure: A setup that can handle large, high-traffic production environments while remaining cost-effective for non-production environments.
- A pricing model that doesn’t interfere with good development practices: Zerops encourages developers to add and use as many environments as possible, even one for each developer. To support this, Zerops’ pricing model doesn’t include any artificial fees for seats or different feature tiers, and the pricing itself is generally 2-3 times cheaper than popular platforms in the PaaS and cloud development space.
- Managed services with professional, highly available setups based on best practices and VSHosting’s know-how: There is no black box behind the way Zerops creates managed services like databases. Everything is transparent with little to no vendor lock-in. This is a pitfall that other PaaS platforms often fall into, and Zerops aims to avoid it.
Zerops is the very definition of a ‘by developers for developers’ product. The core of our vision, as well as our guiding principle, is making developers’ lives easier. While staying humble, well aware of the behemoth of the cloud industry, we’re working hard to gain the trust of the early adopters from the developer community. And to make our vision come true, we’re expanding the Zerops team.
Ales Rechtorik | Zerops, CEO & Co-Founder
Co-Founders’ background
Ales Rechtorik, CEO & Co-Founder, is a full-stack developer and UX designer with over 15 years of experience. He has worked closely with top Czech digital agencies like 2FRESH, Bubble, and NMDS, developing a keen sense for user-centric design. As a co-founder of Costlocker, a business and cost-management tool, Ales gained valuable insights into the business’s challenges.
Jan Saidl, CTO & Co-Founder, is a system architect and backend/infrastructure developer with over 25 years of experience. He’s one of the Czech Republic’s leading experts on the Go programming language. Jan previously served as the lead developer at VSHosting, the largest CE provider of managed hosting services.
For a while, developers have been leaving Heroku, the market leader in this segment, in favor of more innovative and flexible competitors – and thanks to Ales and Jan, more are now quickly switching to Zerops. Given the massive use of AI in programming, developers are now developing much faster and more efficiently.
Premysl Rubes | Presto Ventures, Founder and Managing partner
Naturally, they’re also looking for ways to easily acquire and set up the infrastructure for their projects to run on. At Presto, we like spin-offs. There’s a few in our portfolio already and so far, Zerops is the one that brings us the most joy with its velocity and user interest.