Zero raises $10.3M Seed to build a CRM that updates itself

Zero (Helsinki) has raised $10.3 million (approximately €9 million) in a Seed round led by Primary Venture Partners (New York), with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, and a group of angel founders from Lovable, Supercell, PostHog, and Langdock. Founded in 2024 by Santtu Koivumäki and Tuomo Riekki — who previously helped scale Smartly.io to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue — the company is building what it calls a zero-click CRM: an AI-native platform designed to eliminate the manual data entry that has defined the category for three decades.

The round brings Zero's total known funding to approximately $13 million, following a $2.7 million pre-seed in December 2024 led by 20VC.

The product thesis

The established CRM model is a logging tool: a salesperson closes a call, opens Salesforce, and enters what was said, who attended, and what was agreed. The record is only as complete as the person's memory and willingness to type. Zero's premise is that this model is structurally broken — not because salespeople are negligent, but because the interface was designed for data capture, not for work.

The platform ingests signals from the communications layer — emails, calendar events, calls — and constructs a continuously updated picture of each customer relationship without requiring the user to do anything. The claimed output is a CRM that reflects what is actually happening in an account, not what a rep chose to log after a meeting.

The founders bring direct credibility to the thesis. At Smartly.io, Koivumäki and Riekki worked in a category — social advertising automation — where the shift from manual campaign management to automated execution followed a similar pattern: the product replaced a workflow that was labour-intensive, error-prone, and non-strategic. The CRM market is a different order of magnitude. Salesforce alone generated more than $35 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, built almost entirely on the assumption that humans will fill in the fields.

The investor mix

Primary Venture Partners is a New York-based venture firm focused on enterprise software; its presence as lead signals US distribution ambition from a company that is still building its initial European customer base. Inception Fund and Defiant — the latter publishing its investment thesis under the title "Time to fix the CRM" — complete the institutional cap table.

The angel roster is notable for its operational specificity: founders from Lovable (AI-generated software), Supercell (games), PostHog (product analytics), and Langdock (enterprise AI) have all built products where removing interface friction is at the centre of the value proposition. Their presence suggests conviction that Zero's architectural approach — signal ingestion over manual entry — is sound, not merely a feature roadmap.

The AI-native CRM category is not empty. Attio, Folk, and others are building toward the same structural shift, and each has raised meaningfully. What differentiates Zero's pitch is the founding team's prior proof: they have already converted one category from manual to automated execution, and the credential is specific enough to matter.