B2B sales productivity startup Nektar.ai closes seed round of $8.1 million

$6 bn tranche of funding led by B Capital Group, 3One4 Capital and Nexus Venture Partners; Ritesh Agarwal of OYO Hotels, Deep Nishar of Softbank among clutch of angel investors

B2B sales productivity startup, Nektar.ai, has raised an additional $6 million 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 $2.15 million led by Nexus Venture Partners. The latest round of funding takes the total seed amount raised by the company to $8.1 million, 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.

“(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 & marketing tools. 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.

Founded in 2020 by 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.

“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.

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 five countries-–Singapore, India, Australia, Indonesia, and Vietnam-–with 50 per cent of the workforce being women.