Nektar.ai, which operates a business-to-business (B2B) sales productivity platform, has raised $2.15 million (about Rs 16 crore) in a seed funding round.
The round in Nektar.ai has been led by Nexus Venture Partners, the Singapore-based startup said in a statement. Other participants in this round include Insignia Venture Partners, Arka Venture Labs, Better Capital, and Vietnam Investments Group.
A group of angel investors also participated in this round. These include Five9 executive vice-president Anand Chandrasekaran, Airtel Enterprise Business chief executive officer Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, Cisco chief growth officer Vinod Muthukrishnan, Venkat Tadanki, and Capillary Technologies co-founder and CEO Aneesh Reddy.
Nektar.ai was set up earlier this year by Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and Aravind Ravi Sulekha. Per his LinkedIn profile, Vijayvergiya is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur and was the president and managing director for Asia-Pacific and global accounts at Capillary Technologies.
Sulekha is an IIT-Kharagpur and Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad alumnus and was associated with Zendesk prior to setting up Nektar.ai. The company says it is focussed on building an artificial intelligence-based go-to-market collaboration engine for revenue teams.
The company will use the capital it has raised to enhance its technological infrastructure, build out its platform, and scale up its engineering and product teams. It is currently operating in stealth mode with early adopters and will open to general availability next year.
The investment in Nektar.ai is the latest example of investors betting on an AI-based startup.
In September, business process automation startup Precily Inc. raised seed capital in a round led by Windrose Capital. Similarly, emotion analytics-focussed Entropik Technologies Pvt Ltd raised $8 million (around Rs 58 crore) in a Series A round led by Alpha Wave Incubation.
In June, enterprise AI platform NextBillion AI raised $7 million (around Rs 52.89 crore) in a Series A funding round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital.
In May, photography firm Spyne raised pre-Series A funding from AngelList, along with participation from the Smile Group.