Helsinki startup Zero has raised $10.3 million in seed funding and opened its product to the public, betting that artificial intelligence can replace much of the manual work that has defined customer relationship management software for decades.
Tech.eu reported that the $10.3 million seed round was led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant and Greens. Founders of European technology companies including Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI also backed the company.
Zero said the financing is one of the largest seed rounds raised by a Finnish technology company and follows an earlier pre-seed investment led by 20VC.
Zero wants to remove the work around CRM
Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki, who previously worked together at advertising-software company Smartly.io.
According to Zero, Riekki co-founded Smartly.io while Koivumäki led its go-to-market operations across five markets, helping the business reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Their new company is taking aim at one of enterprise software’s most established categories.
Zero describes its platform as a system that can replace a CRM and the tools surrounding it, combining prospecting, sales, customer growth and go-to-market workflows in one product. Its software uses signals about companies and potential buyers while automating parts of the record-keeping normally performed manually by commercial teams.
EU-Startups describes Zero as a “GTM operating system for the AI era”, positioning the company against established platforms such as Salesforce and HubSpot.
CRM is becoming an automation target
Traditional CRM systems depend heavily on employees keeping records current: updating contacts, logging conversations, recording opportunities and maintaining sales pipelines.
Zero’s argument is that AI can increasingly perform that administrative layer automatically.
The company opened the product publicly alongside the funding announcement and is offering AI-assisted migration from customers’ existing tools, lowering one of the barriers involved in replacing an established CRM system.
The market is already becoming crowded. Newer platforms are competing with incumbents by redesigning customer-data workflows around automation instead of simply adding AI features onto existing database interfaces.
Zero is attempting to go further by questioning whether sales teams should need to actively maintain CRM records at all.
Finland’s software founders are backing another enterprise bet
The investor list is almost as interesting as the funding amount.
Zero’s backers include founders and operators from Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, Silo AI, PostHog, Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI, according to the company.
For European founders, the round offers a wider signal about where enterprise software may be heading.
AI-native startups are no longer competing only by adding copilots to existing categories. Some are attempting to redesign those categories around the assumption that software can perform work previously expected from the user.
The deeper bet behind Zero is therefore not simply that companies need a better CRM. It is that AI could make much of the traditional CRM workflow disappear from the employee’s job entirely.
