Investment: “Zero raises $10.3m”
Zero, a Finnish startup building AI-driven customer relationship management that aims to replace traditional CRMs and the assortment of tools used for prospecting and revenue operations, has closed a $10.3m seed round led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners.
The round included participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens and the founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI.
Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki; Riekki co-founded AI advertising platform Smartly and Koivumäki led Smartly’s go-to-market across five markets, helping the company scale to $100m in ARR. The company is positioning itself as a challenger to Salesforce and HubSpot, saying the existing CRM model is finished.
Zero’s AI technology replaces both the CRM and the wide assortment of tools teams use for prospecting, customer success and broader revenue operations with a single system that works autonomously. Its AI agents build prospect lists, send outbound emails and monitor customer relationships after onboarding, reducing manual work across the customer lifecycle. Earlier backers include Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, PostHog co-founder James Hawkins and operator funds backed by executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI.
“I’ve led sales, customer success and revenue operations. Too much of the job was getting people to update records so leadership could see what was happening, instead of letting them spend that time with customers. That model is finished. The next generation of companies will win and support more customers with smaller teams because the tools they use will finally do their share of the work. That’s what we’re building with Zero.”
