Zero raises €8.93m for AI agents it says can replace the CRM, in one of Finland's largest seed rounds
Zero, founded by two Smartly.io veterans, has raised €8.96 million in seed funding and opened its AI-agent-driven sales platform to the public, after testing it with a small group of beta customers.
Martti Asikainen | 29.9.2026 | Photo by Zero.
Helsinki-based startup Zero announced on 15 September that it has raised €8.93 million in a seed round led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners. The company said the round is among the largest seed rounds raised by a Finnish technology company, though it did not provide comparative figures to support the claim.
Zero is building software it describes as “what comes after CRM” — a system intended to replace customer relationship management platforms and the separate tools businesses typically use for prospecting, sales and customer support. According to the company, AI agents handle much of the underlying work: building prospect lists, keeping records updated, preparing follow-ups, and monitoring customer health after a sale.
Two Smartly.io veterans
Zero was founded by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki, both previously of Finnish advertising technology company Smartly.io, where Riekki was a co-founder and Koivumäki led go-to-market efforts across five markets, helping scale the company to $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
In a blog post announcing the round, Riekki said the pair started Zero because they had seen how much of a sales team’s week disappears into maintaining the software meant to support their work, rather than into selling itself.
According to Riekki, the company’s aim was for a small team to manage more customer relationships without a proportional increase in administrative work as the business grows.
Faster deals, less admin
Zero said three customers who used the product during its private beta period saw concrete results. Workplace analytics company Teamspective reported closing twice as much new business since switching to Zero.
Watchdog, another customer, said its sales cycle shortened from 60 days to 30, including for enterprise deals. A third customer, Emfas, said the software saves its team a full working day each week. These figures come from Zero’s own account of its beta customers’ experiences and have not been independently verified.
Zero has now opened the product to the public, ending the private beta period during which it gathered these results. New users get a 14-day free trial and what the company calls AI-assisted migration, intended to move existing customer data out of a business’s current CRM and other sales tools without requiring manual re-entry.
Nordic and Silicon Valley backers
The round was led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant and Greens. The company also drew a group of prominent angel investors, including Fabian Hedin, co-founder of the Stockholm-based AI app builder Lovable; Ilkka Paananen, chief executive of the Helsinki mobile games studio Supercell; and Peter Sarlin, co-founder of Silo AI, the Finnish AI lab acquired by AMD in 2024.
Founders from the enterprise AI platform Langdock and Swedish e-commerce merchandising startup Depict also invested, though they were not named in the company’s announcement. The new funding builds on an earlier pre-seed round led by 20VC, the venture firm founded by Harry Stebbings.
That round also brought in James Hawkins, co-founder of the product analytics company PostHog, along with investment funds connected to executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI. Together, the two rounds give the company a backer list that draws on both the European and Silicon Valley startup scenes.
