How Zerve AI builds an enterprise-grade developer platform with Deel

Zerve AI is an Irish startup that is building a powerful agentic development environment for data practitioners. From day one, the company operated as a distributed team to access the most specialized engineering talent.

As a young, fast-growing startup with over 60% of its team made up of engineers, Zerve AI faced a dual challenge: hiring elite talent globally while fast-tracking operational maturity to build an enterprise-grade product that users love.

Achieving this level of maturity meant moving away from an ad-hoc HR system to find a solution that could scale with them from the ground up. The team started looking for a global HR platform that could have a centralized employee directory, compliant time-off policies, and a way to verify mandatory security training.

Already using Deel EOR to hire senior developers across North America and Europe, the team adopted Deel’s HR suite to centralize their people operations. This new system was immediately put to the test with an upcoming ISO 27001 audit. A key driver for choosing Deel was its integration with their audit monitoring system, which automated the tracking of required security training.

"We had to prepare for our ISO 27001 audit, and a key requirement was showing that people had completed their security training. We looked at several systems, but the fact that Deel had an integration with our audit system was a decisive factor. It was the fastest path to compliance, while ticking all the pre-audit boxes.”– Mike McClintock, Head of Engineering, Zerve AI

The immediate win was entering the ISO 27001 audit with confidence. Additionally, consolidating on Deel allowed Zerve AI to:

• Fully incentivize talent by being able to issue equity grants for employees of record, adding a stake in the company on top of the benefits of a full employment relationship
• Increase financial transparency by tracking itemized employment costs for better budgeting
• Engage a distributed team by enabling them to recognize performance and to manage time off in real time with Deel's plugin, without having to leave Slack

This foundation enables Zerve AI to focus on its next phase of growth: maturing its people and culture programs. Looking ahead, the company is preparing to run performance reviews and build its full employee onboarding and learning programs within Deel Engage.