B2B Sales Productivity Startup Nektar.Ai Raises $6 Mn From B Capital, Others

B2B sales productivity SaaS startup Nektar.ai has raised an additional $6 Mn in a seed funding round led by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital, 3One4 Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. In November 2020, the company had opened up its seed funding round and raised $2.15 Mn from Nexus Venture Partners. With the latest investment, its total seed round has come to $8.1 Mn.

Dell’s Amit Midha, OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal, Tyler Technologies’ Kevin Merritt, SentinelOne VP Evan Davidson, Softbank senior manager Deep Nishar, EKATA VP & GM Tom Donlea and several other angel investors in the US and Asia SaaS ecosystem also participated in the round.

Founded in 2020 by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha, Nektar.ai is a B2B sales productivity startup that offers AI-powered virtual sales assistants to improve productivity in sales teams. Presently, the startup works with select customers in India and the US in private beta. It plans to launch the product for general availability in the first half of 2022.

Nektar intends to use the funding to accelerate product development and hire its core team across product, engineering, and GTM functions. The company hopes to solve the problem of distributed and remote teams working in data silos which causes disconnect in sales and marketing operations. 

Nektar.ai’s AI-powered guided selling solution sits adjacent to CRM systems like Salesforce and Zoho. It claims to automatically create sales leads and insights based on data from CRMs and other internal and external communication platforms. The startup has created a go-to-market data layer for sales teams through its auto activity capture technology.

Cofounder Vijayvergiya said the disconnect in sales operations “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”. This in turn makes it harder to generate processes that bring in repeat sales and a predictable revenue engine.

Nektar’s auto activity capture offers valuable and accurate first party data of the buyer-seller across sources such as email, calendar, web conference, and communication tools like Slack, CRM, Linkedin, and WhatsApp to provide timely indicators. Additionally, it also surfaces sales leads and insights in email, Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams for seamless collaboration across customer-facing revenue teams.

The sales SaaS market features heavyweights such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Freshworks, Zoho and other companies with a huge presence globally. While these also provide insights to sales and marketing teams, Nektar.ai aims to provide value by building on top of the data collected by these CRMs and SaaS tools. 

Vijayvergiya added, “Nektar.ai ends up becoming a system of intelligence on top of this collected first party data to surface insights such as depth and strength of seller relationship within buyer committee for each deal, alerts on potential solutions to de-risk a high-value late stage deal and momentum of the deal with decision makers involved.“