Helsinki's Zero Raises $10.3M to Kill the CRM as We Know It

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-15

Zero, a Helsinki-based startup, just raised €8.93 million ($10.3 million) in Seed funding to build what it calls the "GTM operating system for the AI era." The company opened to the public today, and it's already turning heads with backing from some serious names in tech. The round was led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, and the founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, and Silo AI. That's not your average cap table. Earlier backers include 20VC, PostHog co-founder James Hawkins, and operator funds backed by execs from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI. In December 2024, Zero raised €2.34 million ($2.7 million) in pre-Seed funding led by 20VC. So what's the big idea? Zero wants to make the traditional CRM obsolete. Instead of a system that requires constant manual updates, Zero uses AI agents to handle the busywork—building prospect lists, sending outbound emails, and monitoring customer health after onboarding. The goal is to let teams spend their time talking to customers, not updating records. ### Why Zero Thinks the CRM Is Broken Let's be honest: most CRMs are where data goes to die. Sales reps spend hours logging calls, updating deal stages, and copy-pasting info between tools. It's a drag on productivity and a source of endless frustration. Zero's founders know this pain firsthand. Tuomo Riekki co-founded Smartly.io, a Helsinki-based ad tech company, and Santtu Koivumäki led Smartly's go-to-market across five markets. They've seen how fragmented tools and manual processes slow down revenue teams. "AI has made it much easier to build products. It hasn't made it easier to build a business around them," Riekki said. "Marketing, sales and customer success teams still spend too much time switching between tools and keeping data up to date. We built Zero so a team can find, win and support customers without the manual work growing alongside the business." ### How It Works: Agents That Do the Work Zero's platform replaces your CRM and a whole stack of other tools—prospecting, outreach, customer success, revenue operations—with a single system that runs on autopilot. The AI agents don't just automate tasks; they learn from every interaction and carry that context forward. For example, when a prospect becomes a customer, the agent that helped win the deal shares what it learned with the agent handling onboarding. No more piecing together the story across separate tools. It's one continuous thread from first touch to renewal. During the private beta, customers like Teamspective reported closing twice as much new business after switching to Zero. That's not just incremental improvement—that's a fundamental shift. ### The Vision: One Person, Full-Cycle GTM Zero's ultimate aim is to let a single full-stack GTM person manage the entire customer relationship, from first outreach to renewal. The agents handle the handoffs that used to require coordination between prospecting, sales, and customer success teams. "I've led sales, customer success and revenue operations," Koivumäki said. "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." ### What This Means for Startups For early-stage companies, Zero's promise is compelling: grow revenue without growing headcount. Instead of hiring a fleet of sales ops people to manage the CRM, you let the agents handle the grunt work. That frees up your team to focus on what actually matters—building relationships and closing deals. Investors seem to agree. Fabian Hedin, co-founder and CTO of Lovable and an angel investor in Zero, said: "Knowledge work is becoming more autonomous, and we will wrestle with existing legacy systems for a long time. Zero is building a GTM operating system that is autonomous by default. I'm excited to be backing a team with great craftsmanship and taste." With this fresh infusion of cash, Zero plans to scale its team and expand its platform. If it delivers on its promise, it could spell the end of the CRM as we know it—and a new era of autonomous go-to-market.