Nektar.ai Raises $8.1 Mn In Seed Round The company intends to use the funding to accelerate product development and hire talent for its core team across product, engineering and GTM functions
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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B2B sales productivity startup Nektar.ai announced to have raised an additional $6 million Seed round of funding led by B Capital Group, 3One4 Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. A clutch of angel investors like Amit Midha (APJ at Dell), Ritesh Agarwal (OYO Hotels), Kevin Merritt (Tyler Technologies), Evan Davidson (SentinelOne), Deep Nishar (Softbank), Tom Donlea (EKATA), and several other prominent go-to-market leaders in the US-Asia cross border SaaS ecosystem also participated in the round.
"2020 transformed the world of B2B Sales and fundamentally changed the way B2B selling and buying gets done. Modern, fast-growing distributed teams work in data silos and operate many disconnected sales and marketing tools. This leads to problems like poor visibility into the revenue data, accountability gaps across revenue function, inconsistent playbook adoption, and lack of collaboration within revenue teams, making it harder to create a repeatable sales process and a predictable revenue engine. We want to enable growing SaaS sales teams to execute a scalable revenue engine and unlock their growth flywheel faster," said Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, co-founder and chief executive officer, Nektar.ai.
The company intends to use the funding to accelerate product development and hire talent for its core team across product, engineering, and GTM functions.
"Nektar.ai's solutions provide great value to distributed revenue teams, which is even more important as enterprises conduct further business across global markets," shared Gabe Greenbaum, general partner, B Capital Group. "B Capital is always eager to work with experienced and knowledgeable founders, and we're confident that Abhijeet, Aravind, and the Nektar.ai team will continue their strong momentum on the path to becoming the industry-leading tool for enterprise sales productivity."
Founded in 2020 by seasoned early-stage SaaS business leaders Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha, Nektar.ai has been in stealth mode to date, working with selected customers in India and the US in private beta. It plans to come out of the beta and launch the product for general availability in the first half of 2022.
"We are thrilled to double down on our investment with Nektar.ai as they execute their vision to build a modern solution of revenue growth for digital, distributed revenue teams," commented Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director, Nexus Venture Partners, who participated in both the funding rounds of the company.
Nektar.ai's AI-powered guided selling solution sits adjacent to CRM systems. It captures buyer/seller data scattered across sources such as e-mail, calendar, web conference, and communication tools like Slack, CRM, Linkedin, and WhatsApp to provide timely insights on leading indicators. Additionally, it also surfaces these insights into workflow tools like email, Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams for seamless collaboration across customer-facing revenue teams, the company said.
"Nektar.ai is taking sales into the era of intelligent systems and remote workforce, enabling sales teams with incredible power to deliver superior outcomes. We are incredibly excited to partner with Abhijeet and Aravind on this journey to enable sales teams to grow in a faster and repeatable manner," added Anurag Ramdasan, principal, 3one4 Capital.
In November 2020, the company had raised an initial $2.15 million led by Nexus Venture Partners. The latest round of funding takes the total seed amount raised by the company to $8.1 million, making it one of the biggest Seed rounds for a SaaS company in Asia.
