The seed round is understood to be one of the biggest seed rounds ever raised by a Finnish tech company.
John Reynolds43 minutes ago
The founders of European AI startups Lovable and Langdock are among the backers of a Finnish startup which is challenging CRM (customer relationship management) giants Salesforce and HubSpot.
Zero has clinched a $10.3m seed round led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens and founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI. It said the seed round was one of the biggest seed rounds ever raised by a Finnish tech company.
Zero’s earlier backers include Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, PostHog co-founder James Hawkins and operator funds backed by executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI.
Zero is positioning itself as the 2026 Salesforce or HubSpot challenger, saying the existing CRM model is finished.
Its AI tech, it says, replaces both the CRM and the wide assortment of tools teams use for prospecting, customer success and broader revenue operations with a single system that works on its own.
Zero’s AI agents build prospect lists, send outbound emails and monitor customer relationships after onboarding, reducing manual work across the customer lifecycle.
Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki, who co-founded Finland-founded AI advertising platform Smartly, and Santtu Koivumäki, who led Smartly’s go-to-market across five markets. The pair helped Smartly scale to $100m in ARR.
Koivumäki said: “I’ve led sales, customer success and revenue operations. Too much of the job was getting people to update records so leadership could see what was happening, instead of letting them spend that time with customers. That model is finished.
“The next generation of companies will win and support more customers with smaller teams because the tools they use will finally do their share of the work. That’s what we’re building with Zero.”
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