A new London-based startup, Zaro, has emerged from stealth mode, securing $5.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Cherry Ventures. Zaro aims to revolutionize AI workspaces by creating a platform that companies own, rather than relying on software vendors. The startup has attracted notable investors, including Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, among others.
Zaro’s founding team includes former employees of Convergence, an AI agent startup acquired by Salesforce. They played a key role in developing Salesforce’s Agentforce but identified a significant flaw: companies using Agentforce were contributing to Salesforce’s data layer instead of their own. This insight led them to create Zaro, which consolidates various AI tools into a single workspace, allowing companies to retain ownership of their context and reduce costs.
The launch of Zaro comes at a time when the enterprise software market is evolving, with companies questioning the sustainability of per-seat SaaS models in the age of AI agents. Zaro’s unique proposition is that companies should control their AI context, a concept that resonates with the growing trend towards company governance over vendor dependency. However, the startup’s claims are yet to be fully tested in the market, and the challenge remains whether they can establish themselves before larger competitors replicate their model.
