CRM challenger Zero gets backing from Lovable and Langdock founders in $10M raise
Tech.eu John Reynolds
Zero just raised $10.3M to take on Salesforce and HubSpot with AI agents. Its backers include founders from Lovable and Langdock, plus early names from Europe’s startup scene.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, John Reynolds — read the original for the full story.
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Finnish startup Zero has pulled in a $10.3 million seed round and is aiming straight at the biggest names in CRM: Salesforce and HubSpot. The round was led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners, with support from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, and founders from Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI.
Zero is not pitching itself as a better dashboard. It says the whole CRM model is broken, and that its software should replace both the core CRM and the pile of tools teams normally stitch together for prospecting, customer success and revenue operations. The company’s AI agents are supposed to build prospect lists, send outbound emails and keep an eye on customer relationships after onboarding, cutting down the manual work that still eats up a lot of sales teams’ time.
The startup says this is one of the biggest seed rounds ever raised by a Finnish tech company. It also had earlier backing from 20VC, PostHog co-founder James Hawkins and operator funds tied to executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI.
Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki, who co-founded Smartly, and Santtu Koivumäki, who ran Smartly’s go-to-market across five markets. The pair say they helped Smartly reach $100 million in ARR. Koivumäki’s pitch is blunt: too much of sales and customer success has been about feeding records into software so management can watch from above. Zero is betting that smaller teams, armed with software that actually does some of the work, will do a better job.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of pitch that sounds obvious right up until it fails. CRM has been bloated for years, and the market has been waiting for someone to argue that updating fields is not a noble human calling. The real test is whether Zero can replace the ritual, not just automate the ugly bits around it.
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