Engineers who helped build Salesforce’s Agentforce raised $5.1M to build its opposite
What happened
London startup Zaro has raised $5.1 million in a pre-seed round led by Cherry Ventures. The founding team includes engineers who helped build Salesforce’s Agentforce. Zaro emerged from stealth aiming to create an AI workspace owned entirely by the companies that use it, rather than the software vendors supplying it. The round includes high-profile angels such as Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and GitHub’s Thomas Dohmke.
Why it matters
Zaro targets a persistent pain point in enterprise AI tools: vendor lock-in and data control. Most AI workspaces operate in the cloud under software providers’ terms, which limits how companies manage, secure, and customize their data and workflows. By building an AI platform that companies themselves own and control, Zaro could shift power back to the users, potentially reducing costs and risks tied to vendor dependency.
The involvement of engineers from Salesforce’s Agentforce signals serious expertise in enterprise AI applications. Their approach challenges the current model where AI capabilities are embedded inside SaaS products that capture valuable user data and lock it away. This raises the stakes for vendor negotiations and integration flexibility for companies relying on AI agents for customer support or other workflows.
What to watch next
How Zaro structures ownership and data governance will be crucial. Practical adoption hinges on whether it can deliver an AI workspace that matches the ease and integration of current vendor solutions while offering genuine control. Also, how the startup leverages capital and the expertise of its high-profile backers will indicate how fast it can scale and expand beyond pre-seed.
For enterprise buyers and operators, Zaro’s progress may signal a new option to break AI vendor lock-in. Investors should watch how quickly it attracts enterprise customers and what integrations it prioritizes, especially in competitive AI-heavy SaaS categories like CRM and support automation.
AI Quick Briefs Editorial Desk
