AI sales assistant provider Nektar.ai raises seed capital

Singapore-based Nektar.ai, which offers an AI-based digital assistant for sales teams, said on Monday that it has raised $2.15 million in a seed funding round.

Nexus Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Arka Venture Labs, Better Capital, Vietnam Investments Group and Insignia Venture Partners, a statement said.

They were joined by Cisco Contact Centre Business unit’s chief growth officer Vinod Muthukrishnan, Capillary Technologies CEO Aneesh Reddy, Airtel enterprise business CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, executive vice president of cloud giant F9 Anand Chandrasekaran and IBM Daksh board member Venkat Tadanki.

The stealth mode startup looks to deploy the fresh capital to ramp up its product and engineering teams, the statement said. Its solution is expected to be generally available next year.

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It was founded earlier this year by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, former president and managing director for APAC region at Capillary Technologies, and Aravind Ravi Sulekha, previously a software engineer at Zendesk and co-founder of real time discussion platform Scrollback.

The Nektar.ai solution connects unstructured data from emails, calendar, LinkedIn and Zoom to CRM, and feeds it to the AI engine, which offers feedback to help sales representatives reach their targets. 

“Nektar.ai is a collaboration platform that captures and leverages the collective experience and intelligence of go-to-market teams and helps operationalise the best practices and winning sales playbooks,” Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director of lead investor Nexus Venture Partners, said. The firm has also backed Postman, Rancher Labs and Druva.

Read: HR-tech startup Leena AI raises $8 mn in Series A

On an average, 43% of B2B sales representatives miss their sales targets, according to data from CSO Insights, the independent research arm of Miller Heiman Group. While the spends for sales technology has increased, target attainment has fallen by over 40%, Nektar added in the statement.

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In fact, the B2B sales market has not undergone a transformation in more than a decade, investor Muthukrishnan said. “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," he said.

The B2B sales productivity market, as per Nektar.ai, is worth about $8-10 billion, with over 15 million sales professionals working in 40,000+ teams.