• Zero raised a $10.3M (€8.93M) seed led by New York's Primary Venture Partners, on top of a €2.34M pre-seed 20VC led in December 2024.
• The only disclosed traction figure behind the round is beta customer Teamspective reportedly doubling new business after switching to Zero's agents.
• Founders Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki bring Smartly.io pedigree, lending operator credibility to a category-replacement pitch aimed beyond Finland's small home market.
• Angel investors include founders from Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI — an operator-network signal alongside the institutional lead.
• Valuation, headcount and customer count beyond Teamspective remain undisclosed.

Zero, a Helsinki-based startup building AI agents meant to replace CRM software along with the separate sales-prospecting and customer-success tools that usually sit around it, has raised a $10.3 million (€8.93 million) seed round, according to ArcticStartup. New York's Primary Venture Partners led the round; Inception Fund, Defiant and Greens also participated, alongside angel investors including founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI, per ArcticStartup and EU-Startups.

The bet

The case investors are underwriting is narrow and testable: Zero's clearest disclosed traction point is Teamspective, a private-beta customer that reportedly closed twice as much new business after switching to Zero's agents, according to EU-Startups. Co-founder Tuomo Riekki, who previously co-founded Smartly.io, a Helsinki-founded advertising-technology company, said, per EU-Startups, that 'AI has made it much easier to build products. It hasn't made it easier to build a business around them.' Co-founder Santtu Koivumäki, who ran Smartly.io's go-to-market across five markets, said 'too much of the job was getting people to update records... That model is finished,' per EU-Startups — the record-keeping burden Zero's agents are built to absorb.

Why a New York fund led a Helsinki seed

Primary Venture Partners is a New York early-stage firm — a notable choice to lead a Helsinki company's first institutional round. Zero had already raised a €2.34 million pre-seed in December 2024 from 20VC, the venture fund tied to the '20VC' podcast, alongside angel checks from founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI. One of those angels, Lovable co-founder Fabian Hedin, said Zero 'is building a GTM operating system that is autonomous by default,' per EU-Startups — the kind of operator reference that often precedes an outside lead writing the check.

The Smartly.io mechanic

Riekki and Koivumäki's shared background at Smartly.io, which scaled by selling into markets far larger than Finland's own, is doing real work in this raise. A small home market tends to push Nordic founders toward global ambition and enterprise-grade product from day one, and Zero's pitch leans on that same pattern — an autonomous GTM system, not a regional CRM add-on. The jump from 20VC's €2.34 million pre-seed to a $10.3 million round led out of New York tracks that same reach beyond the home market, rather than a round sized to the Finnish market alone.

What's still unconfirmed

Zero has not disclosed the round's valuation, headcount, or how many customers beyond Teamspective are running its agents in production, and this piece treats those figures as unconfirmed. The claim that AI agents can fully replace a CRM stack, not just extend one, also rests on a single reported customer result rather than a broader disclosed cohort — a thin evidence base for a category-replacement pitch, regardless of the check size behind it.

The signal worth weighing here is Zero's customer list, not its investor list: a New York lead and a bench of well-known operator-angels are notable, but the only hard evidence disclosed is one Finnish beta customer's doubled new business. That is enough to justify a seed this size for a team with Smartly.io's track record behind it — it is not yet evidence that the CRM has been replaced.