SaaS startup Nektar.AI raises $6 mn seed round

Nektar.AI, a SaaS-based B2B sales productivity startup, has raised $6 million (Rs 44.6 crore) in seed funding led by B Capital Group, 3One4 Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.     

The round also saw Amit Midha, president of the Asia Pacific and Japan at Dell; OYO Hotels’ Ritesh Agarwal; and Kevin Merritt, former president of Tyler Technologies’ data and insights division. 

Others are Evan Davidson, SentinelOne’s vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan; Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank; and Tom Donlea, Ekata’s vice president and general manager of APAC.     

The funds will be used to accelerate product development and scale-up its product and engineering teams.   

“The year 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 revenue data, accountability gaps across revenue functions, inconsistent playbook adoption, and lack of collaboration within revenue teams, making it harder to create a repeatable sales process and a predictable revenue engine,” said Nektar.AI co-founder and CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya.     

The startup helps capture buyer/seller data scattered across sources such as email, calendar, web conference, and communication tools like Slack, CRM, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp to provide insights on leading indicators. The product integrates with tools like email, Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams across customer-facing revenue teams.    

Founded in 2020 by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha, the company has been in stealth mode, working with customers in India and the US in private beta. The firm said it will come out with the beta and launch the product in the first half of 2022.   

The investment in the firm is the latest example of investors betting on AI startups.     

In July, fitness training app Insane AI raised Rs 6.5 crore ($873,000) in a seed funding round led by early-stage venture capital fund Pi Ventures.   

AI-enabled voice-over startup, Murf.ai, raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Elevation Capital in the same month.    

The startup raised $2.15 million in November 2020 led by Nexus Venture Partners.