Full-Time

Go-to-Market Lead

Founding GTM Hire

Zelara.ai

Zelara.ai

1-10 employees

AI-driven 1:1 customer messaging platform

No salary listed

Berlin, Germany

In Person

Based in Berlin, with regular travel to European prospects.

Category
Sales & Account Management (1)
Required Skills
LLM
Sales
Forecasting
Machine Learning
CRM
A/B Testing

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Requirements
  • Experience building a commercial motion from scratch as a founder, early hire, or blank-page-to-first-customers owner.
  • Experience closing complex business-to-business deals without a playbook or marketing-generated pipeline.
  • Ability to reason using funnel metrics, including conversion rates, sales cycle length, and stage bottlenecks.
  • Experience selling technical products to buying committees that include a champion, technical buyer, and economic buyer.
  • Ability to work with chief marketing officers, heads of customer relationship management, and technical stakeholders.
  • Ability to own the process from first touch to signed contract, identify high-leverage deals, and close independently.
  • Ability to use large language models and artificial-intelligence tooling to work faster.
  • Fluency in English.
Responsibilities
  • Own the full funnel from ideal customer profile identification to signed contract, including sourcing, qualifying, discovery, workshops, offers, negotiation, and closing.
  • Close the next wave of design partners alongside the founder and turn closing from a personal skill into a system.
  • Turn the working pitch into a repeatable playbook by documenting what wins and eliminating ineffective approaches.
  • Run outbound as an experiment by testing channels, messaging, and segments rigorously.
  • Shape the ideal customer profile and positioning using market signals and feed customer insights into go-to-market.
  • Build the commercial foundation, including pricing logic, contract mechanics, pipeline hygiene, and forecasting.
  • Partner with the founder on high-impact deals and run other deals independently.
  • Own deals independently and document what works in the sales process and where the motion breaks down.
  • Own the full pipeline end-to-end, drive conversion improvements across the funnel, begin building a repeatable outbound motion, and own the commercial engine end-to-end.
Desired Qualifications
  • German language proficiency, given the current market focus.
  • Experience selling into lifecycle marketing, customer relationship management, or marketing technology.
  • Specific examples of deals that closed because of the candidate's contribution.

Zelara.ai provides an AI-driven system for 1:1 personalized customer communication aimed at B2C brands with repeat lifecycles, such as subscriptions, fintech, e-commerce, and entertainment. It integrates on top of existing CRM stacks (e.g., Braze, Klaviyo, Bird, Customer.io) so teams can deploy without data migration. The platform crafts tailored, brand-safe messages, selects optimal variants and send timing, and learns from every interaction to drive activations, conversions, and retention, with millions of decisions made daily; clients can review messages or run fully autonomously. It uses a performance-based model with a no lift, no pay guarantee, emphasizes data privacy with EU/EEA processing, and promises quick integration with measurable lifts (for example, case studies show 66% reactivation lift and 20–40% improvement in conversions/revenue within about 90 days).

Company Size

1-10

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$3.3M

Headquarters

Berlin, Germany

Founded

2025

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • NAP led Zelara's €3 million June 24, 2026 round, validating demand.
  • The company claims a 66% customer reactivation lift at a European neobank.
  • Its website says clients can go live in weeks across repeat-purchase sectors.

What critics are saying

  • Braze and Klaviyo can bundle similar personalization before Zelara reaches durable scale.
  • Pre-seed €3 million leaves Zelara undercapitalized against enterprise sales cycles and platform imitation.
  • If the 66% neobank lift fails to repeat, performance-based pricing crushes revenue.

What makes Zelara.ai unique

  • June 2026 Zelara sells continuous-learning 1:1 messaging, not campaign automation.
  • It plugs into Braze, Klaviyo, Bird, Customer.io, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud without migration.
  • Founded in March 2026 by ex-HelloFresh AI leader Nikolas Schriefer and Björn Heckel.

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Benefits

Gym Membership

Company Equity

Professional Development Budget

Mentorship Program

Company News

deutsche-startups.de
Aug 3rd, 2026
Berlin's Zelara raises $3.4M to reinvent CRM with AI-powered individual customer communication

Berlin-based startup Zelara has raised €3 million to reinvent customer relationship management with artificial intelligence. Founded in 2025 by Nikolas Schriefer and Björn Heckel, the company positions itself as an AI-powered system for personalised communication. Investors NAP (formerly Cavalry Ventures), Heartfelt, and Angel Invest backed the venture before it had a product or customers. Zelara operates as a B2B software that integrates with existing CRM systems, charging usage-based licensing fees. The platform focuses on individual customer decisions rather than traditional campaign-based marketing. At a leading European neobank, Zelara increased customer reactivation by 66% without replacing existing systems. The company currently works with brands across fintech, e-commerce, digital marketplaces, travel, and subscription services. Founder Heckel emphasises that Zelara couples itself to measurable business outcomes including activation, customer retention, and lifetime value.

Tech.eu
Jun 24th, 2026
Zelara raises $3.4M for AI learning system that boosted customer reactivation by 66%

Zelara, a Berlin-based startup developing an AI-native learning system for lifecycle marketing, has raised €3 million in a pre-seed round led by NAP, with participation from Heartfelt and Angel Invest. Founded by Nikolas Schriefer and Björn Heckel, Zelara operates on top of existing CRM and customer engagement platforms, continuously determining the most effective message, channel and timing for each individual customer. The platform uses customer interactions as feedback to improve future engagement, moving beyond static campaigns and broad segmentation. The company has demonstrated early results with a European neobank, increasing customer reactivation by 66% without requiring changes to existing CRM infrastructure. The funding will support product development, expand capabilities across additional customer touchpoints and accelerate commercial growth through partnerships and team expansion.