Etiq AI

Etiq AI is a London, UK-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2019 by Iris Anson (CEO) and Raluca Crisan (CTO). The company originated in the Zinc VC Mission 2 accelerator programme and was initially created to address bias in AI models, helping organisations build fairer and more transparent AI systems. It subsequently broadened into machine learning testing and debugging tooling, launching a "Data Science Copilot" in March 2025 aimed at reducing the time required to debug and productionise ML and AI pipelines from weeks to minutes.

The present product line has two visible strands. Etiq Core is an observability and verification framework for code written by humans, copilots or agents: it constructs a causal graph of a codebase by tracing lineage objects back to the functions that produced them, so that developers and agents can verify outputs, locate faulty interim steps and audit the lineage of data, models and generated artefacts. It supports Python, Spark and SQL, runs at execution time rather than through static analysis alone, requires no manual instrumentation, and is delivered through library functions, a VS Code extension and a Jupyter Notebook extension. The company positions this as a distinct "code execution lineage" layer that complements, rather than replaces, agent orchestration state and runtime telemetry tools such as OpenTelemetry.

The second strand, presented on the company's website, is a workforce AI-capability platform. It profiles each employee's role and goals during onboarding, assembles role- and industry-specific learning pathways, delivers practice tasks and coaching in the flow of work, and verifies capability by checking the work people actually produce rather than course completion. A "Work Mode" applies the same assistant, coaching and verification to live deliverables. Supporting features include a skills matrix, manager dashboards, workflow-based assessments and audit-ready trails. Industry templates cover finance and insurance, law firms, real estate, market research and logistics, with verification checks tailored to each domain's failure modes (for example, arithmetic and variance errors in finance, or non-existent legal authorities and fabricated citations in legal work). The site notes a patent-pending status.

Founding story

Etiq AI was founded in 2019 by Iris Anson and Raluca Crisan and emerged from the Zinc VC Mission 2 accelerator programme, where its initial focus was mitigating bias in AI systems and supporting fairer, more transparent models. According to the founders, the company began because they had seen first-hand how difficult it was to build robust and reliable machine learning pipelines, with data scientists spending disproportionate time debugging code; existing tooling was either repurposed from software engineering or covered only a narrow part of the ML development process. Crisan, the CTO, had close to 15 years in data science and machine learning, previously serving as Director of Data Science at Merkle and before that on the leadership team at Aquila Insights, an analytics and machine learning start-up acquired by the Merkle Group; she had also built a global analytics and data science team at a mobile marketing company through its NASDAQ listing and co-founded an earlier machine learning startup. Anson holds a degree in Mathematics and Business Studies from the University of Warwick and an artificial intelligence certification from the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, and previously advised in financial services before spending five years as a sole founder of an earlier technology startup.

Business model

Etiq AI licenses proprietary software to organisations. Its terms and conditions describe a software licence schedule covering an initial purchase of software, support and maintenance and optional additional services, with access controlled by licence keys and restricted to designated authorised users; pricing and functionality may vary by authorised user type, and one production instance may be installed per licence per authorised user. The software is hosted on third-party infrastructure-as-a-service, for which clients contract separately. The company has offered a 30-day free trial of its Data Science Copilot and publishes a pricing page.

Software licensing to client organisations, sold per authorised user with support and maintenance and optional additional services, preceded by a free trial period.

Traction

The company's website lists Catapult Digital, The Citation Group, Experian, Intent HQ and Wistron among organisations it works with. TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield profile recorded $2 million raised as of 8 September 2025. Product milestones include the March 2025 launch of the Data Science Copilot and successive releases through Etiq 2.2, which added agents.

Latest developments

In 2025 the company announced €900,000 in seed funding led by GapMinder VC (Fund II), following £1 million in grant funding from Innovate UK, to scale the Data Science Copilot launched in March 2025, add further automated testing and debugging features and LLM capabilities, expand the team and increase commercial marketing. Its documentation now centres on Etiq Core as an observability and verification layer for agent- and copilot-generated code, and its website presents a workforce AI-capability and verification offering with role-based programmes for finance, legal, real estate, market research and logistics teams.