Zaro, a London-based AI platform that replaces fragmented AI tooling with a single adaptive workspace, has raised £3.8 million in a pre-seed round led by Cherry Ventures. Angel backers include Thomas Wolf, Thomas Dohmke, Mandeep Singh, Charlie Songhurst, Marvin Purtorab, and Andy Toulis. Purtorab and Toulis co-founded Convergence and are now backing members of their former team's next venture.
Five of Zaro's eight-person team built AI agents at Convergence before mainstream adoption, launching alongside OpenAI's Operator. CEO and co-founder Michael Bajwa was Convergence's first hire and drove the company from zero to £1 million in ARR in ten weeks before Salesforce acquired it eleven months in. The team then helped ship Agentforce, now at nearly £1 billion in ARR, inside Salesforce.
From that vantage point, the founders observed what no outside observer could: companies running Agentforce were enriching Salesforce's context layer, not their own. Every agent interaction, every automated decision, and every integrated workflow was building institutional intelligence inside vendor infrastructure. The founders chose to leave to build the platform that would change that.
Today's AI tooling market has fragmented into three parallel categories: app builders that produce prototypes disconnected from the data a business actually runs on; context layers that make agents smarter while their outputs still scatter across fragmented tools; and agent frameworks that finish a task and return the user to the apps they were meant to replace. The consequence is that company intelligence resets with every interaction.
Zaro addresses this directly. A single workspace honours the collective intelligence of a company as the asset it is. Agents enrich a shared context layer, that context powers custom applications built from the workspace, and those applications let teams refine the context, driving smarter agents. Every application reflects the company that built it, assembled from its own files, decisions, meeting notes, and operational history.
Using proprietary technology to route routine tasks to cost-efficient models and reserve frontier models for complex work, the platform delivers approximately a 10x cost reduction versus frontier-only deployments. The founding principle is that intelligence should compound for the company that builds it, not for the platform it runs on. By unifying connected tools and data in a single context layer, Zaro ensures that this asset is company-owned and portable, with no binding to a single vendor.
Zaro has a built-in app store with ready-to-install projects and workflows spanning every business function, each pre-built to adapt to the team's own files. The platform is already running Zaro's own HR, finance, and facilities operations.
We built agents that worked flawlessly in isolation, and watched them fail collectively. The intelligence never compounds because the context never carries over. Zaro is the platform that fixes that. Historically, operators have been sold ready meals. SaaS tools that do not match their diet, do not adapt to their needs, and leave them picking out the ingredients they never wanted. Zaro inverts that. Your organisation brings the ingredients: every decision, file, and piece of operational history accumulated. From those ingredients, you have a personal chef with the intelligence to know your business needs at any given moment and the autonomy to build it. As you scale from fifty people to fifty thousand, what that chef produces changes with you. Because it was built by you in the first place.
The Chat GPT moment for enterprise context hasn't arrived yet because no one has closed the full loop. Zaro does. It's the first platform where the AI genuinely gets smarter the longer it's in an organisation, and that compounding effect is what makes it defensible.
