[Funding Alert] B2B Sales Startup Nektar.ai Raises $2.15 Mn Seed Funding Led By Nexus Venture Partners The platform plans to open up its early access program for general availability later next year
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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Singapore-based business-to-business (B2B) sales startup, Nektar.ai on Monday announced it has raised $2.15 million in a seed funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners to build an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered go-to-market collaboration engine for modern revenue teams with participation from Insignia Venture Partners, Arka Venture Labs, Better Capital, and Vietnam Investments Group.
Investors like Five9, Airtel, Cisco, IBM Daksh, and Capillary Technologies also participated in the funding round.
"In the last decade, investment in sales tools globally has grown by five-times but the average sales quota attainment has fallen 40 per cent. According to Forbes, 57 per cent of sales reps missed their numbers in 2018," said Nektar.ai co-founder and chief executive officer Abhijeet Vijayvergiya. "At Nektar.ai we want to change this by reimagining the future of modern sales and building a first of its kind AI-driven sales productivity solution that will help the GTM revenue teams to seamlessly collaborate and make more sales reps successful in meeting their quota."
The startup was founded in 2020 by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya with Aravind Ravi Sulekha. They have been primarily working in stealth mode with a list of early adopters and now plans to use the seed funding to further build out its platform and ramp up the engineering and product teams.
"Nektar.ai is filling a key gap that exists in how revenue teams operate: a collaboration platform that captures and leverages the collective experience and intelligence of the GTM teams and helps in operationalizing the best practices and winning sales playbooks. We are thrilled to partner with Abhijeet and Aravind toward building Nektar into a remarkable company," said Nexus Venture Partners managing director Jishnu Bhattacharjee, in a statement.
The startup actively tries to cultivate and unite the world of amorphous data of emails, calendar, LinkedIn, Zoom to the world of CRM (customer relationship management), and superimposes the same with its practices and sales playbooks.
"We are excited for Abhijeet and his team as they build and grow Nektar.ai to be the leading SaaS company reinventing productivity and intelligence for revenue and GTM teams across South East Asia and the world," stated Insignia Ventures Partners founding managing partner Yinglan Tan.
With over 40,000 B2B sales teams globally and over 15 million sales professionals, the prospect for the B2B sales productivity market is around $8-10-billion and growing.
"B2B Sales has not undergone a transformation for more than a decade and as a result, salespeople continue to work for the tools and not the other way round. It's about time that the vision of tools working for sales teams comes to life. I believe Nektar.ai is on a mission to accomplish that and supercharge the productivity of salespeople," added Cisco chief growth officer Vinod Muthukrishnan.
