Zero Raises $10.3 Million for CRM Alternative Featuring AI Agents

The Finnish software startup Zero has closed a seed funding round totaling $10.3 million. The round was led by New York-based investor Primary Venture Partners. Other participants include Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, as well as founders and entrepreneurs associated with Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, and Silo AI. Zero is developing an AI-based go-to-market operating system designed to replace traditional CRM systems as well as additional tools for sales and customer success.

The goal is not to improve CRM, but to replace it

Zero addresses a problem that persists in many sales organizations despite increasing automation: employees must manually enter, update, and maintain customer data across various systems. Traditional CRM systems were originally built around precisely this manual data entry. Although solutions like Salesforce and HubSpot have since been enhanced with numerous AI features, the Zero founders believe that little has changed in terms of their underlying architecture.

The Finnish startup is therefore taking a more radical approach. Instead of developing yet another CRM with additional AI features, the software is designed to take over a large portion of the administrative and sales tasks previously handled by employees. In the long term, this is intended to render traditional CRM obsolete.

AI Agents Handle Tasks Throughout the Customer Journey

Zero refers to its platform as a “GTM Operating System.” AI agents are designed to handle tasks ranging from the first contact with potential customers to the renewal of existing contracts. Among other things, the software creates lists of prospects, assists with sending outbound emails, and automatically updates customer data. After a successful deal is closed, the system also monitors the development of the customer relationship and is designed to identify potential risks or additional business opportunities.

With this, Zero aims to bring together the previously often-separate areas of prospecting, sales, customer success, and revenue operations more closely. This will enable a single employee to manage larger parts of the customer relationship, while AI agents handle administrative and recurring tasks.

Founders Scaled Smartly.io to $100 Million in ARR

Behind Zero are Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki. Both bring extensive experience in building international software companies. Riekki was one of the co-founders of Smartly.io. Koivumäki was responsible there for the go-to-market strategy across five markets. According to Zero, together they helped scale the company to $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Marketing, sales, and customer success teams still spend too much time switching between tools and keeping data up to date.

Tuomo Riekki, Co-Founder of Zero

According to Riekki, Zero is designed to enable companies to find, acquire, and retain customers without the manual effort increasing proportionally.

The experience gained from building the sales organization served as the starting point for Zero.

Early customers are replacing existing CRM systems

Before its public launch, Zero was already being tested in a private beta phase. According to the startup, early customers have replaced both their existing CRM systems and separate applications for prospecting, outreach, and customer health. The company Teamspective reports, according to Zero, that it has closed twice as much new business since making the switch. Co-founder and CRO Jose Kantola therefore estimates that, mathematically speaking, automation could eliminate the need for every third additional sales hire.

The customer Watchdog also reports shorter sales cycles. According to the company, the average time to close a deal has dropped from 60 to 30 days. Some deals have been closed within a week. Emfas, for its part, says it is currently automating about one full workday per week using Zero. The figures come from customers or from Zero itself and therefore still need to be confirmed through broader implementation.

Primary Venture Partners Leads Seed Round

The $10.3 million funding round is led by Primary Venture Partners of New York. Other participants include Inception Fund, Defiant, and Greens. The list of participating angel investors includes Fabian Hedin, co-founder and CTO of Lovable; Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen; and Silo AI co-founder Peter Sarlin. The founders of Langdock and Depict are also investing.

Zero had previously completed a pre-seed round led by 20VC. Earlier supporters also include PostHog co-founder James Hawkins, as well as operator funds backed by executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI.

Cassie Young, general partner at Primary Venture Partners, sees the opportunity particularly in not building yet another system purely for documenting customer relationships. Instead, she says, Zero can connect processes from the first customer contact through onboarding and expansion to support.

One of Finland’s Largest Seed Rounds

Zero describes the funding as one of the largest seed rounds a Finnish technology company has ever completed. Alongside the funding announcement, the company is opening its previously private platform to the general market. Interested users can initially try Zero for free for 14 days. The startup offers an AI-powered migration service for switching from existing systems.

This marks the start of a crucial test for Zero outside the controlled beta phase.

Taking on an Established Billion-Dollar Market

The timing of Zero’s challenge to traditional CRM systems is no coincidence. Generative AI and increasingly autonomous agents are redefining the very question of which tasks enterprise software will still need employees to perform in the future. Until now, AI functions have often been integrated into existing software architectures. Zero flips this approach on its head and designs its system from the ground up for agents that operate largely autonomously.

If software can capture and update customer data on its own and derive actions from it, traditional CRM—as a manually maintained “system of record”—will lose its significance. Whether this will actually spell the end of CRM, as Zero boldly claims, remains to be seen. Furthermore, the market leaders will certainly not give up their market share without a fight.