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Helsinki's Zero closes its seed round backed by the founders of Lovable, Supercell, and Langdock, betting that AI agents can replace the entire CRM software stack.
- Zero's $10.3M seed round was led by New York's Primary Venture Partners, with founder-angels from some of Europe's most recognized tech exits.
- The company was built by two Smartly.io veterans who scaled that platform to $100M ARR.
- The raise is considered one of the largest seed rounds in Finnish tech history.
Helsinki Startup Closes $10.3M Seed
Zero, a Helsinki-based go-to-market software startup, has closed a $10.3M (€8.93M) seed round led by New York's Primary Venture Partners. The round, announced September 15, 2026, also drew capital from Inception Fund, Defiant, and Greens, alongside angel participation from the founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock, and Silo AI. The raise follows a $2.7M pre-seed in December 2024 led by 20VC, bringing Zero's total financing to roughly $13M.
Zero's pitch is straightforward: the modern sales stack - CRM, prospecting tools, outbound sequencers, customer success platforms - should collapse into one AI-native system that runs itself. The company's agents build prospect lists, send outbound emails, and monitor customer health post-onboarding, shrinking the manual coordination that currently spans a half-dozen disconnected tools.
Who Built Zero, and Why Does Their Background Matter?
Tuomo Riekki co-founded Smartly.io, the Helsinki-based programmatic ad platform that scaled to $100M in annual recurring revenue before being acquired by Providence Equity Partners in 2019. Santtu Koivumäki was Smartly's go-to-market lead across five international markets. Both founders built their careers operating inside the precise workflows they now want to automate - prospect acquisition, pipeline management, account expansion.
That operational history is not incidental. The CRM graveyard is full of products built by engineers who treated sales as a data problem. Zero's founding thesis is that the failure mode was always workflow friction, not data architecture. The agents-first approach attempts to eliminate the friction at its source rather than paper over it with better dashboards.
What Does Zero Actually Replace?
The platform targets the full revenue operations layer: outbound prospecting, CRM data entry, email sequencing, and customer health tracking. AI agents handle each step autonomously, reducing what Zero describes as "zero-click" customer lifecycle management. Prior to the seed round, the company framed its pre-seed product around that zero-click concept - the idea that a sales rep should not need to manually trigger any part of the outbound or retention motion.
The competitive context is crowded. Salesforce, HubSpot, and a tier of newer CRM entrants have all moved aggressively into AI-assisted workflows. Zero's differentiation is the scope of what it replaces rather than adding AI features to an existing record-keeping system. Displacing entrenched tools that sales teams have spent years configuring is a distribution challenge as much as a product one, and $10.3M buys limited runway for a market typically dominated by companies with enterprise procurement relationships.
Why Are the Lovable and Supercell Founders Backing a CRM Company?
The angel cohort carries its own signal. The founders of Lovable - the AI-powered web app builder that emerged from EvenHansen's team in Helsinki - and Supercell, the mobile gaming company behind Clash of Clans, are not obvious CRM investors. Their participation reflects a broader thesis circulating in Nordic tech: that the AI-agent wave creates a viable path to disrupt categories where incumbents have high retention but low satisfaction.
PostHog co-founder James Hawkins is also among Zero's early backers, alongside operator funds drawing on executives from Spotify, Wolt, Shopify, Dropbox, Meta, and OpenAI. The lineup reads more like a bet on the founding team's execution credibility than on any unique feature in the product - a pattern that has defined many of the larger pre-revenue seed rounds in Europe in 2025 and 2026.
What Does the Round Imply About Valuation?
Zero has not disclosed a post-money valuation. At $10.3M raised, the implied ownership structure will depend on how Primary led the terms, but the round size alone - described as among the largest seed rounds in Finnish startup history - suggests the firm priced in meaningful dilution headroom. The company will need to demonstrate retention and expansion metrics before the next raise to justify whatever mark was set here.
Outlook
Zero enters the market at a moment when the AI-native software category is generating real capital but still thin on exits. The founding team's track record gives it credibility the product has not yet earned on its own. Primary's lead adds U.S. distribution access that most European seed companies lack at this stage. The next 18 months will test whether replacing the CRM is a product problem Zero has solved or a sales-cycle problem it has not yet encountered.
