Zero, a Helsinki startup, has raised 8.93 million euros ($10.3 million) in a seed round led by New York firm Primary Venture Partners. The financing, announced on 15 September, backs an effort to replace traditional customer relationship management software with autonomous agents. The company was founded by Tuomo Riekki, who co-founded Smartly.io, and Santtu Koivumaki, who led that company’s market expansion, giving the young firm a team with a track record in Nordic software.
Zero describes its product as a go-to-market operating system that uses agents to handle prospecting, customer outreach and account monitoring, tasks usually spread across separate sales tools. The round followed a 2.34 million euro pre-seed raised in December 2024 and led by 20VC. Backers included Inception Fund, Defiant and Greens, along with founders from Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI, a group that ties the company into the wider European artificial intelligence scene.
Riekki pointed to a gap between building products and building companies around them. “AI has made it much easier to build products,” he said. “It hasn’t made it easier to build a business around them.” The company argues that the harder part, turning technology into revenue, is where autonomous software can now help, by taking on the repetitive work that keeps small teams from selling.
Koivumaki was blunt about what he sees as the end of a familiar operating model. “That model is finished,” he said. “The next generation of companies will win and support more customers with smaller teams.” The claim reflects a broader bet across the sector that lean teams paired with agents can outrun larger, more traditional sales organizations that rely on headcount.
The raise adds to a busy month for Nordic artificial intelligence, with several Helsinki and Stockholm companies attracting international investors. Zero enters a crowded market where incumbents have long dominated sales software, wagering that a system built around agents rather than records can persuade companies to rethink tools they have used for years. The founders plan to use the funding to build out the product and win early customers in Europe and the United States. Finland has become one of the more active Nordic markets for early-stage software deals, producing a steady stream of companies built on top of large language models.
