[Funding alert] B2B sales platform Nektar.ai raises $2.15M seed investment led by Nexus Venture Partners

Singapore-based B2B sales productivity startup Nektar.ai has raised seed funding of $2.15 million led by Nexus Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from Insignia Venture Partners, Arka Venture Labs, Better Capital, and Vietnam Investments Group. 

High profile individual investors like Vinod Muthukrishnan, Chief Growth Officer, CCBU at Cisco; Venkat Tadanki, ex-Founder/board Member at IBM Daksh; Anand Chandrasekaran, EVP, Five9; Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO, Enterprise Business at Airtel; and Aneesh Reddy, Co-founder and CEO at Capillary Technologies, also participated in the funding round.

The funding will be used to build an “AI-powered GTM collaboration engine for modern revenue teams". The startup was founded by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, a seasoned SaaS sales leader, ex-President and MD APAC of Capillary Technologies, and Aravind Ravi Sulekha, ex-Zendesk tech leader.

Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Co-founder and CEO, said: "In the last decade, investment in sales tools globally has grown by five times but the average sales quota attainment has fallen 40 percent. According to Forbes, 57 percent of sales reps missed their numbers in 2018.

"At Nektar.ai, we want to change this by reimagining the future of modern sales and building a first-of-its-kind AI-driven sales productivity solution that will help go-to market revenue teams to seamlessly collaborate and make more sales reps successful in meeting their quotas."

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"B2B sales has not undergone a transformation for more than a decade and salespeople continue to work for the tools and not the other way round. 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," said Vinod Muthukrishnan, Chief Growth Officer at Cisco.

The team has been working in stealth mode and already has a list of early adopters. It will use the funding to build out its platform and expand its product and engineering teams. Nektar aims to open its early access programme later next year.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, said: "Nektar.ai is filling a key gap that exists in how revenue teams operate: a collaboration platform that captures and leverages the collective experience and intelligence of the go-to market teams and helps in operationalising the best practices and winning sales playbooks. We are thrilled to partner with Abhijeet and Aravind toward building Nektar into a remarkable company."

There are more than 40,000 B2B sales team globally and over 15 million sales professionals, with the company pegging the B2B sales productivity market at $10 billion.

The Nektar team believes it can tap this opportunity. It does this by connecting the world of unstructured data like emails, calendar, LinkedIn, Zoom to the world of CRM, and overlays the same with the organisation’s best practices and sales playbooks. This helps even average reps to learn and perform alongside the high performers in their sales teams.

Yinglan Tan, Founding Managing Partner at Insignia Ventures Partners, said, "We are excited for Abhijeet and his team as they build and grow Nektar.ai to be the leading SaaS company reinventing productivity and intelligence for revenue and go-to market teams across South East Asia and the world.”