A London startup called Zaro has come out of stealth. Cherry Ventures led its $5.1mn pre-seed round. Zaro wants to build one AI workspace that a company owns, not its software vendors.
Who is backing Zaro
The angel list is senior for such an early round. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and GitHub chief Thomas Dohmke both invested. Investor Charlie Songhurst, Trouva’s Mandeep Singh, and Convergence co-founders Marvin Purtorab and Andy Toulis joined them.
Cherry Ventures committed before Zaro had a product. The firm showed the startup off at its London summit on Tuesday.
From Agentforce to a rival
Five of Zaro’s eight staff once built AI agents at Convergence. Salesforce bought that startup 11 months in. The team then helped ship Agentforce, Salesforce’s flagship AI agent product.
Chief executive Michael Bajwa was Convergence’s first hire. He says he grew it from zero to £1mn in annual recurring revenue in 10 weeks.
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Inside Salesforce, the founders say they saw a flaw. Companies using Agentforce fed Salesforce’s data layer, not their own. Every interaction built intelligence inside the vendor, they argue.
“We built agents that worked flawlessly in isolation, and watched them fail collectively,” says Bajwa. “The intelligence never compounds because the context never carries over.”
What Zaro is building
Zaro replaces a sprawl of separate AI tools with a single workspace. Agents feed a shared context layer. That context then powers custom apps built from a company’s own files and decisions.
Ownership is the pitch. The company keeps its context and can take it elsewhere. Zaro also routes routine tasks to cheaper models, which it says cuts costs roughly 10-fold against frontier-only setups.
Zaro already runs its own HR, finance, and facilities on the platform, it says. The product also ships with an app store of ready-made workflows.
“Context compounds,” says co-founder and chief technology officer Qian Zheng. “Models commoditise. The platform does not.”
Why it lands now
Zaro arrives in a jittery enterprise-software market. Buyers now ask whether per-seat SaaS survives AI agents. Incumbents from Salesforce to SAP are racing to bolt agentic layers onto their suites.
It also joins startups like the UK’s Deliverance AI. They sell one idea: companies, not vendors, should own and govern their AI.
The caveats
Several claims still need testing. Zaro is eight people and days old in public. Its cost and context figures are its own.
One framing needs care too. The team contributed to Agentforce after the acquisition, rather than building it alone. Zaro’s release calls Agentforce a $1.2bn-ARR product, while Salesforce’s own figures and earlier reporting sit lower, nearer $800mn.
The core idea is simple. A company should keep the AI context it creates. Whether Zaro can deliver that before a bigger rival copies it is the open question.
