A lot of important data gets lost along the sales pipeline because sales teams use multiple tools, including email, Zoom and WhatsApp, to talk with buyers. Nektar.ai wants to solve the problem of data leakage with its sales productivity platform, which helps SaaS revenue teams manage information across different channels by integrating with different apps and delivering key information to the most convenient collaboration tool, like Slack. Nektar.ai announced today that it is exiting stealth mode after two years, and launching the platform for general availability.
Co-founder and CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya told TechCrunch that Nektar.ai’s capabilities are especially relevant now with the tech downturn, where layoffs, cost cuts and budget freezes mean that companies are laser-focused on productivity. Nektar.ai is meant to fill gaps and data leakage left by CRM tools with its no-code solution, which captures revenue activity data from email, calendar, chat and social channels like LinkedIn across all stages of the customer lifecycle.
Vijayvergiya said there are multiple business intelligence tools, like Tableau and Looker, and revenue intelligence and forecasting solutions, including Gong and Clari, but all of these tools rely on CRM data. When a sales team’s CRM is missing key revenue data because of poor user adoption, disconnected systems and siloed teams, that means their analytics are flawed.
He added that poor user adoption of CRMs happens for two main reasons. The first is that sales teams are often too busy to update their day’s work in a CRM. “A B2B salesperson’s day is packed with countless follow-ups, endless meetings, research, discovery, demo, navigating the buying committee, handling competition and doing internal reviews,” Vijayvergiya said, all revenue-generating activities that are important for their quotas. The second reason is that CRMs often have outdated user interfaces, giving sales reps even less incentive to update them.
Nektar.ai stops CRM data leakages by integrating with sales representatives’ inboxes, calendars, meetings (including Zoom and Google Meet), chat (typically Slack) and social media (LinkedIn), and aggregating buyer contacts and sales activities. Vijayvergiya said Nektar.ai’s “capture and sync” accuracy is 95% and all revenue data across the customer lifecycle is added back to a CRM.
“Nektar plugs the CRM data leakage without a user lifting their finger. We basically eliminate the need for user adoption and give all the time back to salespeople to go and sell while relieving their administrative burden,” said Vijayvergiya. The increased visibility into the sales process of different salespeople also means that teams can better understand what sales tactics work best.
TechCrunch last covered Nektar.ai in August 2021, when it raised a seed round of $6 million led by B Capital Group, bringing its total raised to $8.1 million. Its other investors include 3One4 Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Insignia Ventures. During stealth mode, Nektar.ai, which has 32 employees, worked with early customers like Lily.ai, MoEngage and Observe.ai, and said that they saw 30% to 35% pipeline growth and a 18% to 22% increase in deal velocity, because their CRMs were unified with significantly more buyer contacts and sales activity data.
In a statement, Lily.ai senior vice president Pete Lee said “It’s hard to know where to spend your time when you’re not sure if what you’re looking at is accurate. Nektar keeps the data up-to-date and surfaces insights into actual selling time, and inbound vs. outbound activity.”