Srikanth
B2B Sales Productivity startup, Nektar.ai has raised an additional US$ 6Mn seed round of funding led by B Capital Group, 3One4 Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. A clutch of high profile Angel Investors like Amit Midha (President, APJ at Dell), Ritesh Agarwal(Founder & CEO-OYO Hotels), Kevin Merritt (Ex-President Data & Insights- Tyler Technologies), Evan Davidson (VP APJ at SentinelOne), Deep Nishar (Senior Managing Partner at Softbank), Tom Donlea (VP & GM APAC- EKATA) and several other prominent Go To Market leaders in the US-Asia cross border SaaS ecosystem also participated in the round.
In November 2020, the company had raised an initial US$ 2.15Mn led by Nexus Venture Partners. The latest round of funding takes the total seed amount raised by the company to US $8.1Mn, making it one of the biggest seed rounds for a SaaS company in Asia.
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 AI-powered guided selling solution sits adjacent to CRM systems like Salesforce. It captures buyer/seller data scattered across sources such as Email, 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.
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 select 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.
The company has opened up its waitlist and interested customers can sign up for early access to the product on the company’s website.
“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 & 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,” says Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Co-founder & CEO.
“Nektar.ai’s solutions provide great value to distributed revenue teams, which is even more important as enterprises conduct further business across global markets,” said Gabe Greenbaum, General Partner of 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.”
“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”, said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners, who participated in both the funding rounds of the company.
“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.” – Anurag Ramdasan, Principal at 3one4 Capital.
Values like remote-first, work from anywhere, transparency, inclusivity, stock options for all, collective product building form the core of Nektar.ai’s work culture. Currently, they have employees across 5 countries – Singapore, India, Australia, Indonesia, and Vietnam – with 50% of the workforce being women
