Finnish software startup Zero has raised a $10.3 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners as it opens its artificial intelligence-powered customer relationship platform to the public. The financing also included participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, and founders and executives associated with companies including Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, Silo AI, and Depict. The announcement follows a private beta period during which Zero worked with early customers to develop a platform designed to combine prospecting, sales, and customer success workflows.
Building Beyond Traditional CRM
Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu, who previously worked together at digital advertising technology company Smartly.io. Riekki co-founded Smartly.io, while Santtu helped lead its go-to-market operations across five markets, contributing to the company's growth to approximately $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Their experience managing commercial teams led them to identify administrative work, fragmented software, and disconnected customer data as persistent challenges for growing businesses.
The founders built Zero around the idea that information collected throughout a customer relationship should remain accessible across the entire commercial organization. Instead of separating prospecting, sales, onboarding, and customer success into independent tools, the platform maintains shared context as customers move through different stages of their relationship with a company. Zero positions this approach as an alternative to traditional CRM systems that often require employees to manually maintain records and transfer information between applications.
AI Agents Automate Commercial Workflows
Artificial intelligence agents form a central part of Zero's platform and are designed to handle repetitive tasks surrounding customer relationships. These agents can create prospect lists, update customer records, prepare follow-up activities, and monitor changes in customer health while keeping users in control of external communications. The company says the objective is to allow smaller commercial teams to manage more customers without increasing administrative workloads at the same pace as business growth.
Zero is targeting companies that currently rely on multiple products for CRM, prospecting, outreach, and customer success management. By bringing these functions into a single system, the startup aims to reduce the amount of information employees must manually transfer between applications. The company describes its broader ambition as developing the software layer that could eventually replace conventional CRM infrastructure for AI-enabled commercial teams.
Early Customers Report Productivity Gains
During its private beta, Zero worked with customers that began replacing existing CRM and sales-related software with the platform. Teamspective reported doubling the amount of new business it closed after adopting Zero, while Watchdog said its sales cycle declined from 60 days to 30 days, including for enterprise transactions. Another customer, Emfas, reported that the platform saves its team approximately one full workday each week.
These early results form part of Zero's effort to demonstrate how automated workflows can translate into measurable commercial improvements. The company is focusing on reducing repetitive administrative work while helping teams maintain visibility into customer conversations, commitments, and changing requirements. Zero plans to continue developing the product based on feedback from companies using the platform in their daily sales and customer management activities.
Investors Back Zero's Expansion
Primary Venture Partners led the $10.3 million seed financing alongside a group of venture firms and technology industry founders. Individual backers include Fabian Hedin, Supercell founder Ilkka Paananen, and Silo AI co-founder Peter Sarlin, while Zero's previous investors include 20VC and PostHog co-founder James Hawkins. The startup said executives and operators connected to companies such as Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI have also backed earlier financing.
Zero described the financing as one of the larger seed rounds raised by a Finnish technology company. The new capital will support continued product development and the company's efforts to expand adoption following the end of its private beta. Zero has now made the platform generally available and is offering prospective customers a 14-day free trial alongside AI-assisted migration from existing software.
Zero's seed financing and public launch come as artificial intelligence increasingly reshapes the software used by sales and customer-facing teams. By combining CRM, prospecting, outreach, and customer success functions with AI agents, the company is betting that businesses will move toward platforms that automate more of the operational work surrounding customer relationships. With $10.3 million in new funding and its product now open to a broader market, Zero will seek to prove that its integrated model can develop into a credible alternative to established CRM systems.