AI startup Zaro raises £3.8m led by Cherry Ventures with Thomas Wolf
This article covers Zaro, a London-based AI startup, which has raised £3.8m in a preseed funding round to build a single, adaptive workspace designed to stop institutional intelligence being captured inside vendor systems. The development aims to enable enterprises to retain and reuse their institutional knowledge through a portable shared context layer, addressing vendor lock-in and AI operating costs.
Zaro, a London-based AI startup, has raised £3.8m in a pre-seed funding round to build a single, adaptive workspace that aims to stop institutional intelligence from being captured inside vendor systems. The raise will fund development of a shared context layer, a built-in app store and model-routing technology designed to make company-specific AI assets portable and cost-efficient.
Why it matters
AI tooling for enterprises has become fragmented: prototype app builders, context layers and agent frameworks each solve parts of the puzzle but leave companies’ decision-making and data scattered across vendors. That fragmentation means company intelligence resets with every interaction and ownership of institutional knowledge often accrues to platform providers rather than the companies that created it.
Zaro’s proposition is to treat a company’s accumulated files, meeting notes, decisions and workflows as a single, company-owned asset. If it works, that would change how enterprises capture and reuse knowledge from AI agents and reduce vendor lock-in — a technical and commercial issue investors and customers increasingly flag as critical.
Inside the product
Zaro offers a unified workspace where agents enrich a shared context layer, that context powers custom applications built from the workspace, and applications feed back refinements into the context. The startup says this creates a compounding effect: the longer the platform is used, the more tailored the intelligence becomes to that organisation.
Key product claims include:
- A company-owned, portable context layer that aggregates files, operational history and decisions.
- An app store of pre-built projects and workflows that adapt to a team’s own documents.
- Proprietary routing that sends routine tasks to cost-efficient models while reserving frontier models for complex work, reportedly delivering approximately a 10x cost reduction versus frontier-only deployments.
- Early internal usage: Zaro is already running its own HR, finance and facilities operations from the platform.
The team argues this approach avoids returning users to a patchwork of SaaS tools after an agent completes a task, instead keeping outputs and learned context within the company’s control.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Cherry Ventures. Angel backers include Thomas Wolf, Thomas Dohmke, Mandeep Singh, Charlie Songhurst, and two former Convergence co-founders, Marvin Purtorab and Andy Toulis, who are now backing members of their former team’s next venture.
Cherry Ventures partner Dinika Mahtani set out the firm’s rationale.
In the announcement, Dinika Mahtani, Partner at Cherry Ventures, said:
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.
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Founder perspective
Zaro was founded by a small team with deep experience building agents at Convergence. Five of Zaro’s eight-person team previously built AI agents at Convergence before mainstream adoption and the company’s acquisition by Salesforce. Michael Bajwa, CEO and co-founder, was Convergence’s first hire and says he helped grow it to £1m in ARR in ten weeks before the Salesforce acquisition eleven months later. The team later helped ship Agentforce inside Salesforce, a product reported to be approaching nearly £1bn in ARR.
The founders concluded that agents running inside vendor infrastructure were enriching the vendor’s context layer rather than their customers’, prompting them to leave and build a platform that keeps the intelligence with the organisation that created it.
In the announcement, Michael Bajwa, Co-founder & CEO, said:
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 bigger picture
Zaro’s raise sits within a broader wave of enterprise AI startups seeking to capture and operationalise organisational knowledge rather than funnel it into third‑party platforms. The team’s route — founders leaving a high-growth vendor context to build a portable, company-owned layer — echoes a common pattern in the UK and Europe where domain expertise and product experience are becoming the basis for new enterprise bets.
If Zaro can demonstrate the claimed cost savings and the practical portability of context, it will address two investor concerns at once: lowering AI operating costs and reducing vendor lock-in. That combination is likely to keep attracting attention from AI investors focused on enterprise workflows and data ownership.
They've invested in Zaro
Get to know these AI investors
| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Cherry Ventures( ) Cherry Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Europe, speciali... London  | ||||
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| Angel Investors | Location | Connect | Investment Focus | Startup Investments |
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 Thomas Wolf is a French AI researcher, entrepreneur, and angel investor best kno... | UK | |||
 Experienced business angel and exited founder, specialising in technology, AI, m... | ||||
 Charlie Songhurst is one of the most active and recognisable angel investors in ... | ||||
 Marvin Purtorab | ||||
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