Fabian Hedin, co-founder and chief technology officer of AI app builder Lovable, has joined a notable group of Nordic tech leaders backing Zero, a Helsinki-based startup that raised $10.3 million in seed funding to build AI agents designed to replace traditional customer relationship management systems. The funding round, led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners, signals growing confidence among experienced founders that AI agents have matured enough to challenge long-entrenched enterprise software incumbents.

What Problem Is Zero Actually Solving?

Zero targets a persistent inefficiency that has resisted automation despite decades of software innovation. Sales and customer success teams still spend significant time manually entering, updating, and reconciling customer data across multiple disconnected tools. A typical sales organization might use a CRM for record keeping, separate software for prospecting, additional tools for customer success, and more systems for renewal tracking, each holding its own partial view of the same customer relationship.

Zero's pitch is straightforward: replace this entire fragmented stack with a single AI-native system that understands and acts on customer relationships continuously, rather than requiring humans to manually keep each tool synchronized. The company's AI agents are built to handle prospect list creation, conduct outbound outreach, update customer records automatically as new information arrives, and monitor customer health signals that might indicate renewal risk, covering the entire customer journey from first contact through onboarding, expansion, and renewal in one connected system.

Why Are Top Founders Betting on This?

The angel investor list behind Zero's round carries significant weight. Beyond Hedin from Lovable, the round drew backing from Ilkka Paananen, chief executive of gaming company Supercell; Peter Sarlin, co-founder of AI company Silo AI; and the founders of workplace AI company Langdock and design tool Depict. This diverse group of investors, not traditionally associated with CRM investing, points to a broader thesis gaining traction across Nordic and European tech circles.

"The real opportunity in CRM was never to build a better system purely for documenting customer relationships, but to build software organized around the customer relationship itself, spanning the entire journey from first interaction through support," said Cassie Young, general partner at Primary Venture Partners.

Cassie Young, General Partner at Primary Venture Partners

Zero's founders, Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumaki, are veterans of Smartly.io, a Helsinki-based advertising technology company that scaled to $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Riekki co-founded Smartly.io, while Koivumaki led go-to-market efforts across five international markets. Their experience gave them a firsthand view of how much manual, repetitive work still sits underneath modern sales organizations despite automation elsewhere in the software stack.

How Zero Plans to Win Market Share

• AI-Assisted Migration: Zero launched publicly with a 14-day free trial and AI-assisted migration tools designed to help teams move existing CRM data without the lengthy manual setup that typically accompanies migrations between sales tools.
• Autonomous Agent Capabilities: The platform's AI agents can build prospect lists, conduct outreach, update records automatically, and flag renewal risks, handling tasks that sales teams have historically kept under close human review.
• Geographic Expansion Strategy: Product development remains based in Helsinki, while the company is opening a go-to-market and sales office in New York to support its push into the US market.

Zero enters a CRM market that has already attracted other well-capitalized AI-native challengers. London-based Attio raised $52 million in a Series B round in August 2025 on a similar pitch of building an AI-native alternative to legacy CRM software. Whether Zero's fully agent-driven approach to replacing the entire go-to-market stack proves more durable than competing solutions will likely depend on how convincingly its AI agents can be trusted with tasks like updating customer records and flagging renewal risk, responsibilities that sales and customer success teams have historically kept under close human review.

The funding round follows a $2.7 million pre-seed closed in December 2024 and led by 20VC, bringing Zero's total funding to roughly $13 million. Several outlets have described the seed round as one of the largest ever raised by a Finnish technology company. Earlier backers carried over from the pre-seed round include PostHog co-founder James Hawkins and a number of operator funds backed by executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI, a group that reads as much like a bet on the founding team's execution track record as on any single feature of the product itself.

The backing from Lovable's Hedin and other prominent founders suggests that the current wave of capable AI agents has created a realistic opening to disrupt long-entrenched enterprise software categories where incumbents enjoy high customer retention but comparatively low customer satisfaction. For Hedin, the opportunity was clear: while AI has made software development itself nearly fully automated, sales remains a genuinely hard, largely unautomated problem that a strong team still has a real opportunity to solve.