Zero Raises $10.3M Seed Backed By Lovable And Langdock Founders

Zero, a Helsinki based startup building AI agents meant to replace the traditional customer relationship management system, has raised 10.3 million dollars in a seed round backed by a notable group of Nordic and European tech founders, positioning itself as a direct challenger to CRM incumbents Salesforce and HubSpot.

The round was led by New York based Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant and Greens. Alongside those institutional investors, the round drew angel participation from Fabian Hedin, co‑founder and chief technology officer of AI app builder Lovable, Supercell chief executive Ilkka Paananen, Silo AI co‑founder Peter Sarlin, and the founders of workplace AI company Langdock and design tool Depict. The round follows a 2.7 million dollar pre‑seed closed in December 2024 and led by 20VC, bringing Zero's total funding to roughly 13 million dollars. Several outlets covering the round have described it as one of the largest seed rounds ever raised by a Finnish technology company.

Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumaki, two veterans of Smartly.io, the Helsinki based advertising technology company that scaled to 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue before its own high profile growth. Riekki co‑founded Smartly.io, while Koivumaki led its go‑to‑market efforts across five international markets, experience the founders say gave them a first hand view of exactly how much manual, repetitive work still sits underneath modern sales organisations despite years of automation elsewhere in the software stack.

The problem Zero is targeting is one that has persisted even as most other categories of business software have become more automated. Sales and customer success teams still spend significant time manually entering, updating and reconciling customer data across a patchwork of separate tools, a CRM for record keeping, additional software for prospecting, more tools again for customer success and renewal tracking, each holding its own partial view of the same customer relationship. Zero's pitch is that this entire stack can be replaced by a single AI native system that understands and acts on a customer relationship continuously, rather than requiring a human to manually keep each connected tool up to date.

In practice, Zero's AI agents are built to build prospect lists, conduct outbound outreach, update customer records automatically as new information comes in, and monitor customer health signals that might indicate a renewal risk, covering the customer journey from first contact through onboarding, expansion and renewal in one connected system rather than several disconnected ones. Cassie Young, general partner at Primary Venture Partners, has framed the opportunity in similarly structural terms, arguing that the real opportunity in CRM was never to build a better system purely for documenting customer relationships, but to build software organised around the customer relationship itself, spanning the entire journey from first interaction through support.

The angel investor list behind the round carries its own signal about how the founders are positioning the company. Backing from the founders of Lovable and Supercell, companies not typically associated with CRM investing, points to a broader thesis gaining traction across Nordic and European tech circles, that the current wave of capable AI agents creates a realistic opening to disrupt long‑entrenched enterprise software categories where incumbents enjoy high customer retention but comparatively low customer satisfaction. Riekki has said that Hedin's interest in Zero stemmed from a related observation, that while AI has made software development itself almost fully automated, sales remains a genuinely hard, largely unautomated problem that a strong team still has a real opportunity to solve.

Zero's earlier backers, carried over from its pre‑seed round, include 20VC, PostHog co‑founder James Hawkins, and a number of operator funds backed by executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI, a group that reads as much like a bet on the founding team's execution track record as on any single feature of the product itself, a pattern that has defined many of the larger pre‑revenue seed rounds raised across Europe over the past two years.

Alongside the funding announcement, Zero has launched its platform publicly, offering a 14‑day free trial and AI‑assisted migration tools designed to help teams move their existing CRM data across without the lengthy manual setup that migrations between sales tools typically require. Product development will remain based in Helsinki, while the company is opening a go‑to‑market and sales office in New York to support its push into the US market. The company has not disclosed a post‑money valuation alongside the round.

Zero enters a CRM market that has already drawn other well capitalised AI native challengers, including London based Attio, which raised 52 million dollars in a Series B round in August 2025 on a similar pitch of building an AI native alternative to legacy CRM software. Whether Zero's fully agent driven approach to replacing the entire go‑to‑market stack, rather than layering AI features onto an existing CRM, proves more durable than that wave of adjacent competitors will likely come down to how convincingly its AI agents can be trusted with tasks, like updating customer records and flagging renewal risk, that sales and customer success teams have historically kept under close human review.