Zero Opens Its AI CRM After a $10.3 Million Seed

Zero opened its AI CRM to the public on September 15, 2026, the same day it closed a $10.3 million (€8.93 million) seed led by New York firm Primary Venture Partners. Lovable co-founder and CTO Fabian Hedin is among the angels, and the Helsinki company is pitching the product as the sales layer for teams that can already build software with AI.

Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, and founders of Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI joined the round, on top of a $2.7 million pre-seed 20VC led in December 2024. Disclosed funding now stands at $13 million.

Lovable’s CTO Put Money Into the Sales Layer

Hedin did not talk about beating Salesforce. He talked about work that no longer waits for a person to type it in. “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,” Hedin said.

That cheque sits next to a much larger Nordic story. Lovable, the Stockholm vibe-coding company Hedin built with Anton Osika, raised $400 million in August 2026 at a $13.3 billion valuation. Its pitch is that almost anyone can ship a product from a prompt. Zero’s co-founder Tuomo Riekki, who co-founded the Helsinki ad platform Smartly.io, is making the matching claim on the other side of the house.

“AI has made it much easier to build products. It hasn’t made it easier to build a business around them. 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,” Riekki said.

Santtu Koivumäki, who led Smartly’s go-to-market across five markets and co-founded Zero with Riekki in 2024, is blunter about where the hours went. The pair helped Smartly past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, then watched salespeople feed a system of record so managers could see the week.

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.

Santtu Koivumäki, co-founder, Zero

The same network has been arguing, in public, that a custom agent stack can retire a six-figure CRM bill. Harry Stebbings, whose 20VC fund led Zero’s pre-seed and is also on Lovable’s cap table, posted in July 2026 about a team that said it had replaced Salesforce with a vibe-coded system and cut a $600,000 software bill. Jason Lemkin of SaaStr answered that a homemade CRM is fine for the sliver of companies that can keep every integration alive, and that it tends to break when the person who built it leaves. Zero is selling the version of that idea you do not have to staff yourself.

A $10.3 Million Seed, Then the Doors Opened

Primary Venture Partners led the seed. The New York firm has been writing about AI-native go-to-market software as a 2026 theme, and it is an unusual lead for a Helsinki company whose first institutional cheque came from a London media-and-venture shop. Earlier angels and funds include PostHog co-founder James Hawkins, Irena Goldenberg, Jeremy Yap, Discovery Ventures, Illusian, Greens, and operator vehicles tied to executives at Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta and OpenAI.

The Silo AI name on the cap table is part of the same Helsinki loop. Peter Sarlin sold Silo AI to AMD for $665 million in 2024, then left the lab in 2026 to build other AI companies from Finland. Zero did not name which Silo founder wrote the cheque.

The company called the seed one of the largest ever for a Finnish tech firm. That is a stretch once you look at the rest of the city. Helsinki’s largest disclosed rounds over the past year have been later-stage cheques for ICEYE and IQM, and Donut Lab’s $28 million seed in July 2025 still sits well above this one. What Zero actually has is a large software seed plus a public launch on the same morning.

THE MONEY AND THE DOORS

1. December 2, 2024: Raises a $2.7 million (€2.34 million) pre-seed led by 20VC and opens a private beta.
2. December 2024: More than 1,000 companies join the waitlist in the first week, per Zero’s careers page.
3. August 13, 2026: Publishes a tally of what 671 demo requesters already use to run pipeline.
4. September 15, 2026: Closes the $10.3 million seed and opens the product to the public.

Zero Technologies Oy is the Finnish legal entity. The team is based in Helsinki and lists three open roles, including its first outbound hire. Customer data sits in the EU by default, with SOC 2 Type I already in place and Type II in progress.

What Zero Sells Instead of a Classic CRM

Zero still is a CRM. Its own product file calls it an AI-native CRM and go-to-market platform “with a complete CRM of record underneath,” built for seed to Series B teams, from founder-led sales through account executives, SDRs, revenue operations and customer success. The bet is that agents do the feeding, so a small team can run prospecting, closing and customer health in one place.

The directory behind that pitch is large. Zero says it searches more than 350 million contacts and more than 20 million companies, then ranks accounts on fit and on signals such as hiring, funding and job changes. Sequences run across email and LinkedIn. A dialer sits on the record. Gmail, Google Calendar and Outlook sync in. Meeting notes from Fireflies, Fathom, Granola and similar tools become deal updates and follow-up drafts. Product usage, Stripe billing and support tickets land on the same customer file.

THE FOUR MOTIONS ON ONE RECORD

• Prospect: Rank accounts by fit and buying signals, then reach out with email and LinkedIn sequences or the built-in dialer.
• Close: Keep deals current from calls and mail, and prep the next meeting from what was already said.
• Grow: Watch usage, billing and conversations after the customer is live, and flag accounts that need help or are ready to expand.
• Scale: Run agents on triggers and schedules so research, logging and monitoring continue when nobody is in the tab.

Anything that reaches a customer still waits for a person. Agents log, enrich, move stages and draft; the send sits behind an approval, and every action writes to an activity log. Imports come from HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, Pipedrive and CSV, with records enriched on the way in. There is a two-way HubSpot sync for teams that are not ready to cut the cord.

List prices are public. The Pro plan at $60 a seat a month is a launch rate, held for 12 months on annual billing or three months on monthly billing, then $96, with 500 credits per seat each month. Scale is custom, with a 10-seat minimum, SSO, extra integrations and a white-glove migration. A 14-day trial includes 2,000 credits and no card.

HubSpot Still Owns the Teams That Want Out

If the product is a Salesforce killer, the shopping list says otherwise. Koivumäki published figures from 671 startups requesting a demo in the first half of 2026, mostly seed to Series B shops in Europe and the United States. The sample is biased toward teams already unhappy enough to look, and Zero says so in the same post.

WHAT 671 DEMO REQUESTERS ALREADY RUN

HubSpot is the default, and the largest pool of people trying to leave. Attio is second, which is a problem for any pitch that says the itch is a dated interface: those teams already bought a modern CRM and are still shopping. Spreadsheets and Notion together account for 135 companies, more than Attio, more than Pipedrive, and several times Salesforce. Zero’s read is that founders pick a sheet because it is fast on day one, then watch it rot the moment the calendar fills up.

Twice the Business After the Logging Stopped

Private-beta customers, Zero says, replaced a CRM plus separate prospecting, outreach and health tools. The published stories are company-written case studies, not audited filings, and they all point at the same spare headcount thesis Koivumäki put on the raise.

RESULTS ZERO HAS PUT IN WRITING

Teamspective, a Helsinki leadership-enablement company, is the name Zero used on the raise itself. Jose, a sales lead there, estimated that agents and automation replaced every third sales hire. Watchdog, a Norwegian startup, says it threw out the shadow spreadsheet once the record started updating from calls and mail. That is the labour story inside the seed, and it is why operator funds from Wolt and Spotify show up next to a New York lead: those shops already run lean go-to-market teams and want software that keeps them that way.

Why Salesforce Barely Appears in the Sample

Salesforce showed up in 27 of those 671 demo forms. At seed to Series B, Zero says, it is usually an admin-heavy leftover from a previous leader, with consultants attached, not a tool a founder would buy this week. HubSpot’s free and Starter tiers still catch the same companies first. The wall comes later, when the sequences, reporting and extra pipelines sit two tiers up and the bill changes shape.

That is also why the Salesforce-killer headline is the wrong fight. The people opening Zero this week are leaving HubSpot, Attio, Pipedrive, Notion and sheets. They are not ripping out an enterprise org with a revenue-operations team. Zero says as much on its own comparison pages: HubSpot still wins if you need a CMS and deep marketing automation, Attio still wins if you want a highly custom data model, and Salesforce still wins if you are at enterprise scale.

The product even keeps a live HubSpot sync, which is a practical door for a company that claims the old model is finished. Teams can run Zero as the working layer and leave the incumbent in place while they see whether the agents actually hold a pipeline. That is a migration tactic, and it is also an admission that the system of record does not vanish on signup day.

Agents Still Need a Person to Hit Send

Zero draws a hard line that a lot of “AI SDR” tools blur. Agents may research a lead, refresh a record and draft the mail. They may not send it. The company tells language models the same thing it tells buyers: this is a full CRM with agents on it, not a point solution that fires outreach on its own. Proactive recommendations are included on paid plans during beta and may change after that. Marketing email in the Grow module is still listed as coming soon, as is Zero’s own call recorder.

The public launch is the test of whether that design holds when anyone with a card, or without one for two weeks, can spin up a workspace. The 14-day trial ships 2,000 credits. Credits sit beside seats, which is the same two-part bill buyers already know from HubSpot and Attio. A young product with fewer reviews and fewer integrations than those names is now asking those same teams to move the record, the sequencer and the health dashboard in one cut.

Riekki’s line about products getting easier to build is the part of this raise that will still be true if the CRM category does not move an inch. The companies Lovable helped ship still have to find a customer, keep the file honest, and renew the account. Zero is now for sale as the machine that does that work with a smaller room.