Time to fix the CRM, why we invested in Zero

CRM is one of the largest categories in software. Analysts estimate companies around the world will spend over $100bn on this year, and most of that spend is being directed to legacy vendors who were architected twenty-five years ago. Salesforce and the rest of the old guard were built on rigid data models and one central assumption, that a human being will sit down after every call and type in what happened. That assumption has never held and bolting an AI assistant onto the side of that foundation does not fix it. What has changed is that the foundation itself can now be rebuilt, with language models embedded in the data model rather than added to the interface, enrichment native to the platform, and a single record serving sales, marketing and customer success rather than a tool for each. That is a 10x better product, and exactly what Zero are building. – .

Founded in 2024 by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki, Zero is on a mission to replace the CRM rather than improve it. Its in the name - the product is a ‘zero-click’ CRM. Native AI agents continuously enrich a global database of company and contact records and track live buying signals, such as job changes, funding rounds and product usage, to surface the next best customer. They mine tasks out of email and calls, update deal stages as conversations happen, and draft personalised email and LinkedIn sequences in the users own voice. A conversational layer sits over the whole dataset, so you can interrogate their pipeline, prepare for a meeting or build an agent in plain language.

We found Zero and realised within a matter of days that we wanted to be involved. The first reason was the team - Tuomo and Santtu scaled Smartly.io out of Helsinki to $100m ARR, and it shows in how they’re build Zero, with exceptionally high standards on product and the judgement that only comes from having built a category leader once already. Everyone we spoke to in the Nordic ecosystem, including people who have known Tuomo for the better part of a decade, told us the same thing: they are a world-class founders. The second reason was the product. The team has been heads down building for 2 years. They didn’t want to ship an incomplete product, rather deciding to invest more time upfront to perfecting it, than shipping something incomplete. You have one shot to impress a CRM customer, and the Zero team’s mature development approach resonated with us. It means they are launching out of stealth with a far more capable product than most companies of this stage. Its no surprise that we at Defiant run on Zero, and we can see a future where it is ubiquitous in the early stage and VC community as a category leader.

Zero is announcing a $10.3m seed round led by Primary Venture Partners in New York, and we are investing alongside Inception Fund and a group of exceptional angels, among them a co-founder of Lovable and founders from Depict, Supercell, Silo AI, PostHog and Langdock. The team is launching a major new release of the product at the same time and opening a commercial base in New York, while continuing to build from Helsinki. There is much still to prove, but we believe Tuomo and Santtu have everything they need to do it, and we are thrilled to be building alongside them.