Zero raises $10.3M seed to replace CRM with AI agents

Helsinki-based startup Zero has raised $10.3 million in a seed funding round. The company is launching a go-to-market operating system built with AI agents to automate sales, prospecting, and customer success tasks, aiming to replace traditional CRM platforms.

The round was led by New York's Primary Venture Partners. It included participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens Ventures, and founders from companies like Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, and AMD Silo AI. Zero will use the capital to develop its platform and expand its automation of go-to-market work as it launches publicly.

Founders Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki, who previously helped scale Smartly.io to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, started Zero to tackle a category they say businesses depend on but users hate. They argue that current CRM systems, from Salesforce to HubSpot, were built for manual data entry and have merely layered AI on top of a flawed foundation.

The problem with traditional CRM

Sales teams still spend a significant portion of their week maintaining the very systems meant to assist them. Santtu Koivumäki, Co-Founder at Zero, states that too much of the job involves getting people to update records for leadership visibility instead of spending time with customers. "That model is finished," Koivumäki said. 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.

Tuomo Riekki adds that while AI has made product development easier, it hasn't simplified building a business. Marketing, sales, and customer success teams waste time switching between tools and updating data. "We built Zero so a team can find, win and support customers without the manual work growing alongside the business," Riekki says.

How Zero's AI agents work

Zero replaces both the CRM and the assortment of surrounding tools with a single, autonomous system. Its AI agents handle tasks across the entire customer lifecycle. They build prospect lists, conduct outbound email outreach, update records, and monitor customer health after onboarding. The platform's ambition is to make the CRM itself unnecessary.

Fabian Hedin, Co-Founder and CTO of Lovable and an angel investor in Zero, calls it a GTM operating system that is autonomous by default. The idea is to allow one full-stack go-to-market person to manage the customer relationship from first contact to renewal, with AI agents handling work that previously required handoffs between different teams.

Early customer results

During a private beta, customers replaced their CRM and separate tools with Zero. One customer, Teamspective, reports closing twice as much new business since making the switch. Jose Kantola, co-founder and CRO of Teamspective, estimates that Zero's agents and automation eliminate the need for every third sales hire the company would otherwise make.

Investor Sara Wimmercranz, Founding Partner at BackingMinds, which uses Zero for its investment processes, believes the traditional CRM's days are numbered. In five years the CRM will look like the fax machine, Wimmercranz comments. It was built to record what salespeople did, in an era where most of that work is being automated away.

Investor conviction and launch

Cassie Young, General Partner at lead investor Primary Venture Partners, states that the biggest CRM opportunity isn't a better system of record but software built 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, Young said.

The seed round follows an earlier pre-seed led by 20VC. Other backers include PostHog co-founder James Hawkins and funds backed by executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI. Zero is now generally available with a 14-day free trial and offers AI-assisted migration from existing CRM tools.