It is difficult for B2B sales teams to organize information about potential deals. Salespeople often rely on multiple tools (emails, Zoom, WhatsApp etc.) to communicate with buyer committees. Remote sales teams make it even more difficult. Nektar.ai, a B2B productivity startup, aims to reduce the time sales teams spend entering data manually and provide analytics that can help them increase their revenue. Today, the Singapore-based company announced that it had raised $6 million in seed financing. This was led by B Capital Group.3One4 Capital, returning investor Nexus Venture Partners, and angel investors such as Amit Midha (president of Asia Pacific, Japan, and Dell); Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO OYO Hotels; Evan Davidson (VP of SentinelOnes for Asia Pacific, Japan and Asia Pacific); Deep Nishar, senior managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, and Tom Donlea (general manager for APAC at Ekatas).The new funding, combined with the $2.15 million raised by Nexus Venture Partners in November 2020, brings Nektar.ais total seed capital up to $8.1million. According to the company, this is the largest ever seed round for a SaaS business based in Asia. Nektar.ais is remote-first, and half of its employees are women.Since its inception in 2020, Nektar.ai was in stealth mode and working with hundreds clients in private beta mode. The waitlist for sign-ups is open at the moment. Plans are to launch publicly in 2022. A portion of the seed funding from Nektar.ais will be used for building a team that is focused on the United States.Nektar.ai is designed for SaaS revenue managers who need to manage information across multiple channels including email, calendars and web conferences, Slack and CRM tools, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn. It is difficult for them to communicate, follow playbooks or set of best practices and gain a complete understanding of their revenue and deals pipeline. Nektar.ai can integrate with other apps, surface key data, and deliver it to the most convenient collaboration platform for a team like Slack.TechCrunch spoke to Vijayvergiya about how Nektar.ai has accelerated product development over the past six months because there was strong demand for a guided-selling solution in the market. We also onboarded more than 200 prospects from its waiting list.Nektar.ai has launched a web console to managers. It also includes a Chrome extension, integrations with Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Slack. Capture Bot is an AI-based feature that extracts key information from online conversations between buyers and salespeople. This allows for the discovery of data that might otherwise be hidden in multiple inboxes or calendars. This improves the accuracy of their CRM tools, and allows sales managers see how engaged their team is with potential customers and how prospects are progressing.Individual representatives can save time by using Nektar.ais tools to enter data manually. Analytics such as multithreading scores are also available to them that allow them to identify which deals were won and lost. Vijayvergiya cited an example of a client who found that they won deals when they had at most four contacts with buyers committees after the demo stage. It was able to engage with more than four buyers committee members on potential deals, which led to its sales representatives engaging with them.Nektar.ai also helps SaaS sales professionals save time and money by building first-party contact databases from their inboxes. Vijayvergiya stated that one client saved $50,000 by organizing their contacts rather than purchasing third-party data.B Capital Group general partner Gabe Greenbaum stated that Nektar.ais solutions offer great value to distributed revenue team members, which is especially important as businesses expand into global markets. B Capital is always open to working with knowledgeable and experienced founders. We are confident that Abhijeet and Aravind will continue to build on their momentum to become the industry-leading tool to increase enterprise sales productivity.
