A scrappy London startup called Zaro just emerged from stealth mode with a provocative mission: build the anti-Salesforce Agentforce. The company secured $5.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Cherry Ventures, positioning itself as the antidote to vendor lock-in in the exploding enterprise AI space.
What Happened
Zaro’s founding team includes engineers who directly contributed to Salesforce’s Agentforce platform—the company’s marquee AI agent offering that helps businesses automate complex workflows. Rather than continuing down that path, the founders recognized a fundamental problem: companies increasingly depend on software vendors to manage their AI infrastructure, creating dangerous dependencies and limiting control over proprietary data and workflows.
The startup’s pitch is elegantly simple: create a single, unified AI workspace that companies fully own and control, rather than renting capabilities from multiple vendors. This positions Zaro directly opposite to the walled-garden approach that dominates enterprise software today.
The funding announcement reveals serious heavyweight backing for such an early-stage company. The angel roster includes Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face (the open-source AI powerhouse), and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. This caliber of support signals confidence that the team understands both AI infrastructure and developer ecosystems at a granular level.
Key Points
Zaro’s timing capitalizes on growing skepticism about enterprise AI vendor dominance. As companies deploy more AI agents internally, the costs of switching platforms and migrating workflows become prohibitively expensive—classic vendor lock-in dynamics. By offering an owned, portable alternative, Zaro addresses a real pain point that’s only intensifying as AI adoption accelerates.
The presence of Wolf and other AI infrastructure veterans on the cap table suggests the technical approach has credibility. Wolf’s Hugging Face pioneered democratizing large language models, and similar philosophy appears central to Zaro’s mission of decentralizing AI workspace control away from vendor platforms.
Cherry Ventures’ lead on the round indicates strong institutional confidence. The Berlin-based firm has backed numerous successful European tech exits and typically bets on founders solving structural market problems, not just incremental improvements.
What This Means
Zaro represents a broader shift in how enterprises think about AI infrastructure. As AI becomes mission-critical, companies increasingly demand sovereignty over their tools, data, and workflows. The Agentforce comparison is deliberately provocative—it signals Zaro sees an opportunity to compete head-to-head with Salesforce’s ambitions by offering fundamentally different economics and control models.
The startup enters a crowded space of AI orchestration platforms, but its positioning around ownership and decentralization differentiates it from competitors focused on ease-of-use or specific verticals. If executed well, Zaro could become the preferred infrastructure choice for enterprises unwilling to cede control to major cloud vendors.
