Lovable and Supercell founders back Zero’s $10.3M raise to disrupt the CRM market
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova ● Covered by 2 sources
Zero raised $10.3M to build AI agents that could replace CRM software. The founders think sales tools should run in the background, not make reps babysit Salesforce.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Zero has pulled in a $10.3 million seed round, with Primary Venture Partners leading the deal, as the Helsinki startup tries to reinvent CRM with AI agents instead of another dashboard full of tabs. The company now says it has 13 people, plans a New York office for sales and go-to-market work, and wants to move past Attio and Clay.
The bet is unusual because it comes from people who already lived inside the problem. Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki spent years building the enterprise sales platform at Smartly.io, where the company grew to 1,000 employees and worked with names like Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify. They saw the mess from the inside: Salesforce plus a pile of separate tools for reporting, forecasting, marketing, and campaign building.
Zero’s pitch is that all of that can be handled by agents that do the annoying work automatically. Riekki says the system can help find leads, keep CRM records current, take notes, and watch customer engagement so clients stay satisfied. He also says the software goes beyond traditional CRMs such as HubSpot, Attio, or Salesforce by staying in the background and monitoring conversations on places like WhatsApp, LinkedIn direct messages, and social media comments.
The funding stack is getting bigger too. This seed follows a $2.7 million pre-seed round led by 20VC in December 2024, bringing total financing to $13 million. Backers in the new round include Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, and the founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, and Silo AI, plus returning investors such as 20VC, James Hawkins of PostHog, and operator funds tied to people at Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI.
That is a crowded field, and a pricey one. Attio raised $52 million in August 2025 and says it is building an AI-native CRM, while Clay hit a $7.1 billion valuation after its $115 million Series D. Zero is trying to win by arguing that the real problem is not better record-keeping, but getting rid of the record-keeping habit altogether.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the cleanest CRM pitch in a while: don’t make salespeople hate the software, make the software do the nagging. That said, “ambient monitoring” sounds lovely until the company has to explain why its background snooping is somehow friendlier than the old clunky login screen. Enterprise software keeps trying to become invisible; usually it just becomes harder to audit.
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