B2B sales productivity startup — Nektar.ai has raised a seed round of funding in order to build an AI-powered GTM collaboration engine for modern revenue teams. Nexus Venture Partners primarily led this funding in collaboration with other venture partners like Insignia Venture Partners, Vietnam Investments Group, Better Capital, as well as Arka Venture Labs. 

Alongside, some of the high profile individual investors were also involved for this seed funding round. Some of the key individuals involved were — Anand Chandrasekaran, EVP at Five9, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO, Enterprise Business at Airtel, Vinod Muthukrishnan, the Chief Growth Officer, CCBU at Cisco, Venkat Tadanki, ex-founder and board member at IBM Daksh, and Aneesh Reddy, the co-founder & CEO at Capillary Technologies also participated in the funding round.

Singapore-based startup Nektar.ai was founded earlier this year by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, a seasoned SaaS sales leader and also the ex-president & MD APAC of Capillary Technologies, along with Aravind Ravi Sulekha, ethe x-Zendesk tech leader. 

According to Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, the co-founder & CEO, the last decade, the investment in sales tools globally has seen a rise of five times. However, the average sales quota attainment has seen a drastic fall of 40%. As a matter of fact, Forbes has stated that this is because 57% of sales representatives missed their numbers in 2018. 

With Nektar.ai, the founders wish to change this by creating the future of modern sales and creating the first of its kind AI-driven sales productivity solution that will assist the go-to-market revenue teams in collaborating and meeting their Quota.”

The B2B sales productivity market has immense potential and currently encompasses over 40,000 B2B sales teams globally and over 15 million sales professionals. The market is around $8-10 billion and expected to grow massively. And that’s why the startups Nektar.AI has been established to address this opportunity. The startup aims to connect 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. Such a workflow will help the sales reps to learn and perform alongside the high performers in their sales teams.

When asked an early investor of companies like Postman, Rancher Labs, Druva, Jishnu Bhattacharjee, the managing director at Nexus Venture Partners stated that the establishment of this startup is to fill a critical gap that exists in how revenue teams operate. According to him, a collaboration platform that leverages the collective experience and intelligence of the go-to-market teams as well as assisting 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,” said Bhattacharjee.

To this note, Yinglan Tan, the founding managing partner at Insignia Ventures Partners, added, “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.” 

“B2B Sales has not transformed for more than a decade, and as a result, 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.

Nektar’s founding team has been initially working in stealth mode with a select list of early adopters and now plans to use the seed funding to further build out its platform and ramp up the engineering and product teams. It plans to open up its highly anticipated early access program for general availability later next year.