• Prague-based PaaS provider Zerops attracts EUR 500K of Pre-Seed investment
• The startups offers auto-scalable solution for app developers, particularly beneficial for small and medium-sized teams
• The investment is meant to help expose Zerops to a broader clientele

This June, Czech cloud platform-as-a-service startup Zerops raised its Pre-Seed round of EUR 500K. The lead investor of the round is the well-known Prague-based fund Presto Ventures (invested in Lakmoos, for example), with participation from Gi21 Capital (invested in Blindspot Technologies, among others). 

Essentially, Zerops’ PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a developer-first solution offering an all-in-one environment for projects of any size and complexity, across all stages of the app development. It incorporates best development practices and offers guided paths to simplify the development process for solo developers and small to medium-sized teams to focus on the creative side of their job.

Beginning as a Spin-Off

Zerops was formed in 2017 as a brainchild of Damir Špoljarič, co-founder and CEO of vshosting, a provider of managed hosting services from a datacenter built from the ground up. The premise was simple – to take the high-quality, highly available professional setups created and managed for customers (often large ecommerce platforms and generally large high-traffic projects) and put them in an automated platform. From that came the name, a play on words: from DevOps to ‘ZeroOps’ – meaning that there’s no need for a team of DevOps admins to take care of an application’s infrastructure, because the maintenance is automated.

Active development began in 2019, and Aleš Rechtorík was hired solely as a frontend developer. At the time, he could already boast about 10 years of experience with top digital agencies in the Czech market (2FRESH, Follow Bubble, and NMDS), as well as a startup founder (Costlocker). As such, Mr Rechtorík was well-informed on matters of business, marketing, design, and UX to complement his primary proficiency as a developer. 

‘I was fed up with the struggle, endless hours, the pressure and just wanted to land a cushy corporate job. But then I saw this job ad for Zerops and I immediately knew this was the project I could truly utilize all the experience I previously gained. And sure enough, within a year I gained Damir’s full trust and essentially became product owner of Zerops, responsible for nearly every aspect of the project,’ Mr Rechtorík recalls.

The New Board and Fluctuations

However, already in 2020, vshosting was fully acquired by Contabo, a global hosting company based in Germany. According to Mr Rechtorík, the board had no idea what to do with a startup-like project like Zerops and no understanding of its target group. Contabo focused solely on their profitable business that they were aggressively scaling, and Zerops became an afterthought. In practice, it meant that the new board let Mr Rechtorík and his team develop the product, but refraining from any additional funding desperately needed to expand the team, given how ambitious the project was.

Mr Rechtorík, however, was determined to push forward as he assumed a number of different roles: product owner, project manager, designer, UX designer, frontend developer, DevRel, supportю. Zerops grew into his magnum opus to which he gave everything.

Unfortunately, at the end of 2022, after Contabo finalized the sale of a majority stake to KKR, the project was shut down. This was three months after the semi-official launch of Zerops, while it was already beginning to gain traction. Mr Rechtorík knew exactly what to do: his immediate reaction was: ‘O, so are you going to sell Zerops to us?’

Going Independent

Thus began his team’s year and half long journey of investment-scouting to help relaunch Zerops independently. A great added challenge was the fact that, despite all the know-how and strategy lying within the team, Mr Rechtorík and his team weren’t the official founders. They had to buy intellectual property worth EUR 1.5M from Contabo – in the year 2023, which we all remember as the recession year.

Luckily, Mr Špoljarič had a more in-depth understanding and sided with the team. He admits that he needed no further proof than first paying clients from day one of launching Zerops’  He helped negotiate with Contabo and push the deal through, as well as agreed to invest money from his Gi21 Capital fund.

‘When Ales and his team embraced the idea of Zerops, they quickly managed to find a gap in the market and create a complex infrastructure service that allows for a fast application deployment. Faster than creating a client account elsewhere, in some cases. Thanks to the integrated high availability, Zerops maintains the original idea of production operations reliability. At the same time, the platform offers unique vertical and horizontal scaling and maximum developer convenience,’ Mr Špoljarič tells ITKeyMedia.

Eventually, Presto Ventures came on board as the lead investor. As for Contabo, they decided to keep a small stake in the new Zerops company in exchange for the intellectual property, allowing the startup to keep utilizing their global infrastructure.

In the end, Mr Rechtorík became the co-founder and CEO, the other co-founder and CTO is Jan Saidl, the dev/infra lead from the original team. They managed to keep most of the rest of the team working for ESOP.

Catching Up with the Competition

‘This years-long struggle cost us a lot of time, during which our competitors pushed forward at light speed, some – such as Fly.io or Render – raising up to USD 100M. but we still have a great product at our hands and a vision to make developer’s life easier. To give you an analogy, our competitors and us have a cocktail bar, people go there to have a good time and get drunk. Our competitors are based in fancy venues in the city center and you can order tapas with caviar along your cocktail. We have a garage on the outskirts, with just a couple of seats and no food, but our drinks are just as damn good, if not better, with every ingredient homemade with love and the atmosphere is cozy,’ Mr Rechtorík explains.

Simply put, Zerops is a platform that helps developers focus on developing, while offloading the tedious and effort-consuming job of managing infrastructure. This comes especially handy for small to medium-sized teams that cannot afford DevOps engineers, who are scarce and expensive. There are several PaaS providers like this today, and the difference comes down to how the features are mixed. Zerops aims for the perfectly balanced mix of scalability, extensibility, and developer experience, accumulating the best features from each of the main options people have when it comes to hosting apps (big cloud, PaaS, VPS, edge/serverless).

‘For a while, developers have been leaving Heroku, the market leader in this segment, in favor of more innovative and flexible competitors. Thanks to Aleš 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. 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,’ Presto Ventures’ founder and managing partner Přemysl Rubeš comments.

Mr Rechtorík shares that Zerops is set to use the raised funds to prove that the startup is worth further investment.

‘At this point, we cannot compete with the global and extremely well-funded competitors, we need a grassroot / community approach, convince early adopters to give us a chance and help us push the vision forward. The years we spent actively developing Zerops were spent mostly on the underlying platform, so now we have a lot of catching up to do with documentation, knowledge base, examples, and community building,’ the CEO admits.

Specifically, Zerops’ plan is to focus heavily on the most popular development frameworks and open source tools. Continuing the drinking places analogy, Zerops now has the investment that will help it prove that its bar can and should be loved globally, not just by the loyal patrons.