Built by lifecycle marketers who got tired of sending the same email to everyone.
Zalera started with a single question: why should a segment of 40,000 people all receive the same message when the data to route them individually already exists?
The origin
Too much data. Not enough decisions.
We worked inside lifecycle marketing teams, building flows, running tests, and maintaining segment trees that were meant to approximate personalization. The CRM held plenty of behavioral data, but most campaigns still made one broad decision for a group of customers.
The gap became clear at send time. Open history, purchase stage, recency, and custom events were available, yet rules-based logic could not weigh them together for each recipient. The missing piece was not another dashboard or content editor. It was a decision layer that could choose the most relevant available variant for one person in one moment.
2024
We incorporated in Berlin and started building the layer.
We founded Zalera in Berlin in 2024 to work on that specific gap. The first version entered a closed early-access program in late 2025 with a small group of DTC and SaaS teams already using Braze or Klaviyo. Across early-access pilots, we saw a 23% average lift in CTR and an 18% reduction in unsubscribes within the same pilot cohort.
Zalera is not a new CRM, and it does not replace the send tools lifecycle teams already know. It reads the context around a trigger, routes a variant decision back to the CRM, and leaves the actual send where it belongs.
The team
Three people with deep roots in lifecycle marketing and machine learning.
Björn Heckel
Co-founder and CEO
Björn Heckel, CEO & Co-Founder, focuses on the strategy behind lifecycle marketing programs for e-commerce and subscription businesses. He works at the point where customer context becomes a message decision, helping teams move beyond broad rules and static segments. His work centers on turning behavioral data, purchase stage, and engagement history into practical choices at send time.
Fabian Schulz
Co-founder and CTO
Fabian Schulz, CTO & Co-Founder, builds the systems that score customer context and select message variants in real time. His background spans recommendation systems, behavioral modeling, and decision engines. At Zalera, he leads the scoring architecture that connects CRM events to a per-person routing decision without moving the actual send out of Braze or Klaviyo.
Nadia Kowalski
Head of Growth
Nadia Kowalski, Head of Growth, brings hands-on experience in lifecycle marketing operations across DTC and subscription programs. She specializes in Braze and Klaviyo, including flow design, campaign operations, testing, and the practical constraints teams face when personalization meets daily execution. Nadia keeps Zalera grounded in the workflows and decisions lifecycle marketers manage every week.
How we think about this work
01
Decisions, not dashboards
A dashboard can show that a campaign underperformed. It does not decide what the next customer should receive. Zalera reads the available behavioral context, scores the message variants, and routes a decision back to the CRM. The useful output is a better choice at send time, not another report to interpret.
02
Works with the tools your team already knows
Braze and Klaviyo already hold your segments, content, events, and sending logic. Zalera adds one focused layer above them. It returns zlr_variant_decision in Braze or zlr_variant in Klaviyo, so lifecycle teams can improve variant selection without rebuilding their flows or moving campaign execution elsewhere.
03
Individual signal, not cohort averaging
A segment can group customers who share one visible trait, but it cannot represent every difference within that group. Zalera scores each recipient against the available variants using individual recency, engagement, purchase stage, and custom events. The result is a separate routing choice for every person in the send.
04
Transparency in every routing choice
Lifecycle teams need to understand why a customer received one variant instead of another. Zalera keeps an audit trail of the variants considered, the confidence scores attached to them, and the signals that influenced the route. That makes model behavior easier to review alongside campaign performance and CRM data.
Ready to add the decision layer?
Start with 50,000 free decisions per month. No credit card required.