Helsinki-based Zero has raised a $10.3 million seed round led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens Ventures and founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and AMD Silo AI. Zero is developing a go-to-market (GTM) operating system intended to replace traditional CRM and the assortment of prospecting, outreach and customer-success tools that surround it. Its AI agents can build prospect lists, conduct outbound outreach, update records and monitor customer health across the customer journey from initial contact through renewal. Zero will use the funding to further develop its AI-driven platform and expand its approach to automating go-to-market work, as it launches publicly with a 14-day free trial and AI-assisted migration for existing CRM users.
Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki, who co-founded Smartly.io, and Santtu Koivumäki, who led Smartly’s go-to-market across five markets; together they helped scale Smartly.io to $100M in ARR. The founders say their experience running commercial teams informed the decision to rebuild the category around doing the manual work those teams still perform.
“AI has made it much easier to build products. It hasn’t made it easier to build a business around them. Marketing, sales and customer success teams still spend too much time switching between tools and keeping data up to date. We built Zero so a team can find, win and support customers without the manual work growing alongside the business,” says Tuomo Riekki, Co-Founder at Zero.
CRM replaced by an AI-driven GTM operating system
Zero positions itself as more than a better system of record. The company says CRM was designed around manual data entry, and while AI has been added to existing platforms, those additions were layered on top of an architecture that assumes people will keep records updated. Zero’s agents are intended to remove much of that manual maintenance: building prospect lists, sending outbound emails, updating systems and monitoring customer health after onboarding, so teams do not have to stitch together a customer’s story across multiple tools when a prospect becomes a customer.
“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,” states Santtu Koivumäki, Co-Founder at Zero.
During private beta, customers replaced their CRM and separate prospecting, outreach and customer health tools with Zero. Teamspective reported closing twice as much new business since switching to Zero; its co-founder and CRO, Jose Kantola, estimates that Zero’s agents and automation eliminate the need for every third sales hire. Zero’s ambition is to make the CRM itself unnecessary and to enable one full-stack GTM person to manage the customer relationship from first outreach to renewal, with agents doing work that previously required handoffs between prospecting, sales and customer success teams.
“Knowledge work is becoming more autonomous, and we will wrestle with existing legacy systems for a long time. Zero is building a GTM operating system that is autonomous by default. I’m excited to be backing a team with great craftsmanship and taste,” says Fabian Hedin, Co-Founder and CTO of Lovable and angel investor in Zero.
Funding and backers
The seed round brings together experienced operators and founders as investors. Alongside Primary Venture Partners, the round includes Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens Ventures and participation from founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and AMD Silo AI. Individual investors named in the round include Fabian Hedin, Ilkka Paananen, Peter Sarlin and the founders of Langdock and Depict. The seed follows an earlier pre-seed led by 20VC; Zero’s earlier backers also include PostHog co-founder James Hawkins and operator funds backed by executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI.
“In five years the CRM will look like the fax machine. It was built to record what salespeople did, in an era where most of that work is being automated away. Where everyone else has just built a better CRM, Zero is building what comes after it,” comments Sara Wimmercranz, Founding Partner at BackingMinds, which replaced its CRM with Zero to run its investment processes.
“The biggest opportunity in CRM isn’t to build a better system of record; it’s to finally build software around the customer. Zero is creating an end-to-end platform that can understand and serve a customer from their very first interaction through onboarding, expansion, and support. Having lived the pain themselves, Tuomo and Santtu understand this problem at a level few founders do — and their deep commitment to both product excellence and customer outcomes gives us tremendous conviction in their ability to redefine the category,” states Cassie Young, General Partner at Primary Venture Partners.
Zero is now generally available, offering a 14-day free trial and a fast, AI-assisted migration from customers’ existing tools.
