Helsinki’s Zero Raises €8.93M to Build an AI-Native CRM for the Next Generation of Businesses

Helsinki-based Zero has raised €8.93 million ($10.3 million) in a Seed funding round as it looks to reshape how companies manage sales, customer relationships and go-to-market operations in the AI era.

The round was led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, and founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI. Zero’s earlier backers include 20VC, PostHog co-founder James Hawkins, and operator funds backed by executives from companies including Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI.

Built by the Team Behind Smartly.io

Founded in 2024, Zero was created by Tuomo Riekki, who co-founded Smartly.io, and Santtu Koivumäki, who previously led Smartly.io’s go-to-market operations across five markets. Their experience exposed them to the growing complexity of modern sales technology and the amount of manual work required to keep traditional CRM systems updated.

Zero is designed around a different approach: instead of forcing teams to constantly update a CRM, AI agents handle much of the operational work automatically.

A Zero-Click Approach to CRM

Zero describes itself as a GTM operating system for the AI era, rather than simply another CRM.

Its agents can build prospect lists, identify buying signals, conduct outreach, monitor customer health and help manage accounts after a deal is closed. The platform brings prospecting, sales, customer success and revenue operations into a unified system, reducing the need for teams to switch between multiple specialized tools.

The company's goal is ambitious: make the CRM itself almost invisible by allowing a small, full-stack GTM team to manage the customer journey from initial outreach through renewal while AI agents take care of repetitive administrative work.

From Prospecting to Customer Growth

Zero's platform carries information from one stage of the customer journey into the next. Data collected during prospecting and sales can then be used to support customer success and account growth, eliminating the need to reconstruct customer histories across separate systems.

During its private beta, Zero says customers replaced their existing CRM alongside separate prospecting, outreach and customer-health tools. One customer, Teamspective, reported closing twice as much new business after switching to the platform.

From $2.7M Pre-Seed to €8.93M Seed

The new funding follows Zero's $2.7 million pre-seed round announced in December 2024, which was led by 20VC. The company is now opening its product to the public as it moves beyond its private-beta phase.

With its latest funding, Zero is positioning itself to challenge traditional CRM architecture and build a more autonomous approach to B2B growth—one where software handles more of the operational workload while human teams spend more time building customer relationships.