- Zero has raised a seed round of $10.3 million, with Primary Venture Partners acting as the lead investor, in order to develop AI agents that can replace conventional CRM systems.
- A team of thirteen people is going to open an office in New York and aims to beat companies such as Attio and Clay.
- The $2.7 million pre-seed round brings Zero’s total funding to $13 million.
Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki had spent several years creating the enterprise sales platform at Smartly.io, a company that eventually employed 1,000 people and served well-known clients such as Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify.
As time went on, they realised that the system relied on Salesforce and numerous separate tools that users found difficult to use. The two of them now, having secured €10.3 million in new seed funding and with a 13-member team based in Helsinki and New York, intend to replace this collection of disparate tools with AI agents and aim to go ahead of both Attio and Clay.
Zero, founded in 2024 by Riekki and Koivumäki, is headquartered in Helsinki. Riekki co-founded Smartly.io in 2013 and, in 2019, sold a majority stake in it to Providence Equity Partners for around $223 million. Both Riekki and Koivumäki resigned in 2022.
“We ended up with a lot of different sales tools — Salesforce and also many other tools for reporting, forecasting and for marketing as well as for building campaigns,” says Riekki, one of the co-founders and CEO of Zero.
As Riekki explains, “We take care of all aspects involved, such as coming up with ideas and locating leads—for example, by identifying every law firm in the Nordics—as well as automatic note-taking, keeping the CRM records current, and monitoring customer engagement to ensure that clients remain satisfied.”
He goes on to say that “our method goes beyond that of traditional CRMs such as HubSpot, Attio, or Salesforce.” Zero began its private beta trial with customers worldwide, from San Francisco to Sydney, and now has hundreds of users.
New money, and a New York office
The $10.3 million funding round was led by Primary Venture Partners, a venture capital fund headquartered in New York that has previously invested in Chief, Alma, and Dandy. Inception Fund, Defiant, and Greens also took part, together with the founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, and Silo AI.
Among the returning investors are 20VC, James Hawkins, co-founder of PostHog, and various operator funds associated with executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI. This funding round follows a $2.7 million pre-seed round led by 20VC in December 2024, bringing Zero’s total financing to $13 million.
As a founder who has been in the field before, Riekki notes that this advantage is useful at both the pre-seed and seed stages, though he stresses the importance of having a solid story about the market at the seed stage. Product development will remain based in Helsinki, with a go-to-market and sales office being opened in New York. The team aims to grow from 13 to around 20 people by the end of the year.
Riekki says the support from the Lovable and Supercell founders stems from both Nordic solidarity and a shared strategy.
“Many Nordic founders help each other; I’m also an angel investor in several companies.Fabian from Lovable likes our approach because, even though software development is almost fully automated, sales is still tough. He thinks this is a big challenge that a skilled team can solve,” he tells TFN.
Cassie Young, general partner at Primary, added, “The biggest opportunity in CRM isn’t to build a better system of record; it’s to finally build software around the customer. Having lived the pain themselves, Tuomo and Santtu understand this problem at a level few founders do.”
A crowded field, freshly re-priced
The London-based company Attio raised $52 million in a Series B financing in August 2025, bringing its total funding to $116 million. Attio is working on developing an AI-native CRM. Clay, based in New York, raised $115 million in a Series D round, reaching a $7.1 billion valuation, more than double its valuation just 13 months earlier.
According to Riekki, Zero’s method is unlike that of its more aggressive rivals.
“There has always been a reluctance on the part of salespeople to log into a CRM, and that trouble can now be avoided. Our approach operates in the background, constantly keeping an eye on conversations on platforms such as WhatsApp, LinkedIn direct messages, and comments on social media, and then gathers all that information together,” he says.
In 2025, the CRM software market was valued at approximately $287.26 billion and is projected to reach $633.34 billion by 2030, representing a 17.3% annual growth rate. This rapid growth is intensifying competition among Salesforce, HubSpot, Attio, and Clay, forcing Zero’s 13-member team to demonstrate that ambient monitoring can be more valuable than automated outbound messaging.
Riekki has 18 months and a lease in New York to demonstrate that the idea works.
