Nektar.ai, a business-to-business sales productivity startup based in Singapore, announced that it has raised over US$2.1 million in a seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners.

(From left) Nektar founders Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha / Photo credit: Nektar

Insignia Venture Partners, Arka Venture Labs, Better Capital, and the Vietnam Investments Group also participated in the round, along with a host of individual investors. These include Five9 executive vice president of product management Anand Chandrasekaran, CEO of Airtel’s enterprise business Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, and Cisco chief growth officer Vinod Muthukrishnan, among others.

Nektar was founded early this year by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha. Previously, Vijayvergiya worked as the president and managing director of Asia Pacific at cloud software firm Capillary Technologies, while Sulekha was the tech leader at Zendesk.

“In the last decade, the investment in sales tools globally has grown by five times, but the average sales quota attainment has fallen 40%. According to Forbes, 57% of sales reps missed their numbers in 2018,” said CEO Vijayvergiya. His company, he said, aims to build an AI-driven sales productivity solution that will help revenue teams to collaborate and sales reps to meet their quota.

Nektar connects unstructured data from sources like emails, calendars, LinkedIn, and Zoom to customer relationship management and then overlays these points with the organization’s practices and sales playbooks.

The company had been initially working in stealth mode with a select list of early adopters. It now plans to use the new funds to further build out its platform, ramp up its engineering and product teams, and open up its early access program for general availability by next year.