- Zeliq has raised a €7 million seed round extension, led by The Moon Venture and including new investors Julien Jean and Sylvestre Blavet, as well as existing investors Ora Global and Cleo Ventures.
- The Paris-based startup increased its user base from 2,000 to 20,000 and tripled its revenue before closing the funding round.
- Dorian Ciavarella, founder, is now working on his second company after selling Hivency in 2021.
Dorian Ciavarella had previously developed Hivency, an influencer marketing platform that reached a user base of 500,000 influencers and attracted $6 million in funding before being sold to Skeepers, a company backed by PSG Equity, in October 2021.
Having spent one year leading Skeepers’ European operations, he co-founded Zeliq with Guillaume Cruz to address a problem he encountered as a customer: sales teams typically rely on around 10 different tools that do not work together.
The €7 million seed round extension raised by Zeliq was led by The Moon Venture and included new investors Julien Jean, chairman at JJCapinvest, and Sylvestre Blavet, chairman at Freelance.com, as well as existing investors Ora Global and Cleo Ventures. Zeliq’s total funding since 2023 now amounts to €21 million.
“For 10 years, sales teams have been adding SaaS tools. The result has been greater complexity, more time spent switching between them, and less time spent on selling. The best salespeople will not be replaced by AI, as they will work with it,” Ciavarella told Tech Funding News.
This is the third time he has raised money for the company: the first round was a pre-seed in January 2023, based only on the idea. The second round took place in 2024, before any revenue had been generated; and the most recent round was completed after Zeliq had tripled its annual recurring revenue and its user base had grown from 2,000 to 20,000.
How Zeliq works
Zeliq is aimed at sales teams of five to fifty members and acquires customers mainly through a self-service, credit-card-based, product-led growth approach in over 100 countries. The platform draws on a database containing 450 million contacts to provide contact enrichment and enable multichannel outreach.
Its latest feature, Zelia, was in beta for six months before being made available more widely. Sales directors can request that Zelia identify 500 relevant contacts and set up outreach sequences.
The agent also monitors prospect accounts for signs that they are about to buy, such as hiring large numbers of people or appointing new executives, and highlights these to the sales representatives.
“We create a situation in which the human has to make the decision, and after that the agent will carry out the task for you,” Ciavarella says.
Market competition and what’s next
Ciavarella states that Zeliq has no direct European competitor offering the same combination of data and agents; he refers only to two US companies: Rox, an AI sales-agent startup based in San Francisco with a valuation of $1.2 billion in March 2026, and another unnamed company.
Although Clay and Apollo.io also compete for the same prospecting and outreach budgets, they do not describe themselves as being as agent-focused as Rox or Zeliq.
On the future of the agentic AI sales market, Ciavarella remains cautious: “We are at the beginning,” he states. In his view, the principal difficulties lie in designing agents that users can understand and in creating effective go-to-market strategies in an increasingly competitive sector.
It remains to be seen whether Zeliq’s early advantage will hold up against competition from better-funded rivals.
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