London-based artificial intelligence startup Zaro has raised £3.8 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Cherry Ventures, the company announced this week.
The round also attracted several prominent angel investors, including Thomas Wolf, Thomas Dohmke, Mandeep Singh, Charlie Songhurst, Marvin Purtorab, and Andy Toulis. Purtorab and Toulis previously co-founded Convergence and are now backing the next venture launched by members of their former team.
Zaro was founded by a team with deep experience in enterprise AI. Five of the company’s eight employees previously built AI agents at Convergence before AI agents entered the mainstream market. The team launched products alongside OpenAI’s Operator and later joined Salesforce after Convergence was acquired.
Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Michael Bajwa was the first employee hired at Convergence. According to the company, he helped grow the business from zero to £1 million in annual recurring revenue within ten weeks. Salesforce acquired Convergence eleven months after it was founded.
Following the acquisition, members of the team worked on Agentforce inside Salesforce. The product has since grown to nearly £1 billion in annual recurring revenue.
The founders say their experience working on enterprise AI platforms revealed a problem that many companies could not see from the outside. Businesses using AI systems were improving the context and intelligence of vendor-owned platforms rather than building their own long-term knowledge base. Information generated through AI interactions, automated decisions, and workflows remained inside external systems.
That observation led the founders to leave Salesforce and launch Zaro.
The company argues that the current AI software market has become fragmented. Existing products generally fall into three categories: application builders, context platforms, and agent frameworks. According to Zaro, these tools often operate separately, causing company knowledge and context to become disconnected between systems.
Zaro’s platform is designed to address that issue through a single workspace where AI agents, applications, and business data operate together. The company says every interaction helps strengthen a shared context layer that belongs to the customer. Applications built on the platform can use that context, while user activity continues to improve it over time.
As a result, the company believes organisational knowledge can accumulate instead of resetting between tools and workflows.
The platform uses proprietary technology to manage AI model usage. Routine tasks are routed to lower-cost models, while more complex work is handled by frontier models. Zaro says this approach delivers approximately ten times lower costs compared with deployments that rely only on frontier AI models.
The company also emphasises that customer data and intelligence remain portable rather than being tied to a single software provider.
In addition, Zaro includes a built-in app store with pre-configured projects and workflows covering different business functions. These applications automatically adapt to a team’s existing files and information. The company says it already uses the platform internally to run its own human resources, finance, and facilities operations.
With fresh funding secured, Zaro plans to continue developing its platform around a central idea: that the intelligence created inside an organisation should remain an asset owned by that organisation, not by the software vendors serving it.
