Zelara lands €3M to bring continuous learning to customer engagement

Zelara, a Berlin-based startup developing an AI-native learning system for lifecycle marketing, has raised €3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by NAP, with participation from Heartfelt and Angel Invest.

Despite significant investment in CRM and marketing technology, many brands continue to rely on predefined customer journeys, static segments, and rule-based campaigns that struggle to adapt to changing customer behaviour. While existing customer engagement platforms are designed to execute campaigns at scale, they typically lack the ability to continuously learn from customer interactions and improve over time.

Founded by Nikolas Schriefer and Björn Heckel, Zelara aims to address this challenge. The company has developed a learning system that operates on top of existing CRM and customer engagement platforms, enabling brands to move beyond static campaigns and broad segmentation.

The platform continuously determines the most effective message, channel, and timing for each individual customer, while marketers retain control over strategic objectives and business constraints. Zelara manages the ongoing decision-making, execution, and learning process, using customer interactions as feedback to improve future engagement.

Björn Heckel, co-founder of Zelara, said that years of building customer engagement technology revealed a common limitation: most systems are designed around campaigns and segments rather than individual customers.

We built Zelara from the opposite starting point. Instead of optimizing campaigns for segments, the system learns how to engage each individual customer in ways that create more value for both the customer and the business.

Nikolas Schriefer, co-founder of Zelara, said every customer interaction generates valuable feedback that can be used to improve future engagement. He added that the platform uses these signals to drive compounding gains across activation, retention, reactivation, and customer lifetime value.

The company has already demonstrated early results with a leading European neobank, where its platform increased customer reactivation by 66 per cent without requiring changes to the existing CRM infrastructure or customer journey design.

The new funding will be used to further develop Zelara’s AI-native learning system, expand its capabilities across additional customer touchpoints, and accelerate commercial growth through new partnerships, team expansion, and broader market adoption.