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 GTM operating system designed to replace traditional CRM and the collection of sales, prospecting and customer-success tools around it. Its AI agents can build prospect lists, conduct outbound outreach, update records and monitor customer health, covering 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. For their next company, they chose a category businesses depend on and users love to hate. Having spent years building and running commercial teams, they knew how much work went into keeping the software running. With Zero, they’re rebuilding it around doing that work.
“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 was built around people manually entering and updating data. Salesforce launched in 1999, HubSpot in 2006, and the AI added since has been layered on top of that assumption rather than replacing it. Sales teams still spend a large part of the week maintaining the system that is meant to be helping them.
“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.
Winning a customer is only the beginning. Zero’s agents use what was learned during prospecting and sales to help teams support that customer and grow the account. Teams don’t have to piece the story together across separate tools when a prospect becomes a customer.
“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.
Zero 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 on its own. Zero’s agents build prospect lists, send outbound emails and monitor customer health after onboarding, reducing manual work across the customer lifecycle. Zero’s ambition is to make the CRM itself unnecessary. Zero is a GTM operating system that lets one full-stack GTM person manage the customer relationship from first outreach to renewal, with agents doing the work that previously required handoffs between prospecting, sales and customer success teams.
“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.
During private beta, customers replaced their CRM and separate prospecting, outreach and customer health tools with Zero. Teamspective reports 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.
The round brings together the people who made building products easy to back what is still hard: winning customers and supporting them at scale. Investors include Fabian Hedin, co-founder of Lovable; Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell; Peter Sarlin, co-founder of Silo AI; and the founders of Langdock and Depict. The seed round 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.
“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, with a 14-day free trial and a fast, AI-assisted migration from customers’ existing tools.
Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/zero-raises-10-3-million-seed/
