Nektar co-founders Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha
Singapore-based Nektar.ai, a productivity platform for sales teams, has raised $2.15 million in seed funding. Founded earlier this year, Nektar has been working in stealth mode with five companies, and has plans for an early adopter release before a public launch by the end of 2021. Its seed round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Insignia Venture Partners, Arka Venture Labs, Better Capital and Vietnam Investments Group.
Individual investors also contributed to the funding, including Five9 executive vice president Anand Chandrasekaran; Airtel chief executive of enterprise business Ganesh Lakshminarayanan; Vinod Muthukrishnan, the chief growth officer of Cisco’s Contact Center Business Unit; Venkat Tadanki, who sold his former startup Daksh to IBM in 2004; and Capillary Technologies co-founder and CEO Aneesh Reddy.
Founded by CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, former president and Asia-Pacific managing director at Capillary Technologies, and chief technology officer Aravind Ravi Sulekha, Nektar lets sales teams integrate workplace tools, like Slack, Google Meet, Microsoft Team, Microsoft Exchange and WhatsApp, with CRM platforms, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Hubspot.
Vijayvergiya told TechCrunch this helps sales teams by reducing time spent on administrative tasks and enabling them to feed data from various software into analytics tools and automated to-do lists. One of Nektar’s features are “playbooks,” or sets of best practices, goals and alerts that sales, customer support and marketing teams can collaborate on and reference.
During stealth mode, Nektar has been working with five companies, and currently has a waitlist of about 20 companies. Most of its early users are primarily late-stage SaaS companies, Vijayvergiya said.
Vijayvergiya said Nektar’s most direct competition are customization tools that are already built into CRM software. Nektar’s advantage is that it it acts as an “AI layer on top of the sales data” and is quicker to use than CRM customization features.
“Most sales tools today work for the organization and make the user work for the tools rather than the tools working for the user,” he added.