Zaro raises $5.1M pre-seed to build AI context layer for enterprise
June 9, 2026
London-based Zaro has raised $5.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Cherry Ventures to develop an AI-native workspace that gives enterprises a shared context layer for their AI agents, data, and workflows. Angels participating in the round include Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face; Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub; Charlie Songhurst; Mandeep Singh; and Marvin Purtorab and Andy Toulis, the co-founders of Convergence.
The problem Zaro is addressing is structural. As businesses deploy AI agents and automation tools, the intelligence those systems generate — decisions made, processes run, context accumulated — typically stays inside the vendor’s platform rather than returning to the organisation that created it. Most agent systems operate as a relay: one agent completes a task and passes its output to the next, but neither retains shared memory of what happened. Every new task starts from zero context.
Zaro replaces that relay with a persistent shared layer that all agents read from and write to simultaneously. Company emails, meeting recordings, Slack threads, documents, and operational history all live in the same space, which agents access directly. The company also provides application-building tools, a marketplace of pre-built workflow templates, and a multi-model routing system that directs simpler tasks to lower-cost AI models — a setup Zaro says can reduce AI operating costs substantially compared with frontier-only deployments. Cherry Ventures, which committed before Zaro had a finished product, has itself replaced a number of internal tools with the platform.
The company was founded in 2025 by Michael Bajwa and Qian Zheng, both veterans of Convergence, the AI agent startup acquired by Salesforce eleven months after launch. Bajwa joined Convergence as its first product hire and took Proxy — one of the first AI agents capable of navigating software without API integrations — from zero to $1 million in ARR in ten weeks. Zheng, the first engineering hire, built the production system from scratch. After the acquisition, the pair helped ship Agentforce, now generating $1.2 billion in ARR. Five of Zaro’s eight-person team also worked at Convergence. The company is already using its own platform to run HR, finance, and facilities internally.
The $5.1 million raise converts to approximately £3.81 million at current exchange rates. The new capital will support product development, team growth, and the broader commercial launch of the platform. Zaro arrives in an enterprise software market increasingly focused on whether AI agents can compound value over time rather than generate isolated, stateless outputs. “Context compounds,” says co-founder and CTO Qian Zheng. “Models become increasingly interchangeable over time, but the value created from an organisation’s accumulated knowledge remains unique.”
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