Zelara Gets €3M to Fix How Brands Talk to Customers
Zelara founders, Björn Heckel and Nikolas Schriefer © Zelara
Berlin-based startup Zelara has closed a €3 million pre-seed round to accelerate development of its AI-powered lifecycle marketing platform. The round was led by NAP, with participation from Heartfelt and Angel Invest, as reported by Startup Valley News.
The company was founded by Nikolas Schriefer and Björn Heckel, both veterans of large-scale customer engagement work. Schriefer previously founded an AdTech company and led AI product initiatives at HelloFresh. Heckel brings more than 20 years of engineering leadership from Uber, Salesforce, and HelloFresh, plus a PhD in Computer Science.
Their shared frustration: despite heavy investment in CRM and marketing technology, most brands still operate on static rules, predefined customer journeys, and segments set up months ago. Zelara sits on top of existing tools like Braze or Klaviyo and acts as an orchestration layer that continuously learns which message, channel, and timing works best for each individual customer.
The results are hard to argue with. At a leading European neobank, Zelara lifted customer reactivation rates by 66 percent, without requiring any changes to the existing CRM infrastructure.
Fabian Krautwurst, partner at lead investor NAP, points to a larger shift: as AI agents increasingly mediate how consumers discover brands, first-party data becomes strategically more valuable, and the cost of wasting it keeps rising.
The fresh capital will go toward deepening the AI platform and expanding partnerships with B2C companies. Zelara is also growing its team to build on its early customer wins.
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