These days, consumers are drawn in many different directions, making it more difficult for companies to hold consumers’ attention longer than the typical social media scroll. Concurrently, it is anticipated that worldwide sales through social media platforms will approach $3 trillion by 2026.
Nectar AI aims to make it simpler for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer firms to interact with customers. The sisters Misbah and Farah Uraizee, who both worked at Meta and seen this issue personally, founded the social commerce platform.
While Farah was developing solutions for Facebook groups and communities, Misbah created AI-powered conversational and monetization tools for consumers and companies.
According to Misbah Uraizee, TechCrunch, “We were building these products to encourage people to spend more time within Meta’s ecosystem, and what we realized quickly was that the products were Band-Aids at best.” We saw a powerful trend of people gravitating toward private messaging, especially members of Generation Z. The previous five years have seen an explosion in messaging.
Uraizee cited a recent interview with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri to prove this tendency, stating that most of the app’s growth and usage time was concentrated on the Stories and direct messaging sections.
Because of this, according to the Nectar AI team, marketers must come up with fresh ideas for engaging and converting customers where they spend most of their time. According to Farah Uraizee in an interview, the startup allows D2C and e-commerce businesses to replace the half-dozen products they now use with Nectar’s AI-generated messaging tool, which leverages massive language models and retrieval-augmented generation to connect at scale.
The business joins other e-commerce-focused companies, including SuperOrdinary, Loup (previously Social Chat), and Rebuy. Nectar AI’s unique selling point, according to the Uraizees, is its customization technology, which includes identity mapping from social media to customer profiles for commerce and a proprietary LLM centered on trade that companies can use whenever they engage with consumers.
Even if everything seems fantastic, you’ll have to wait a while to try it. According to Misbah Uraizee, the creators of Nectar AI still view the company as being quite secretive; the software is now in beta, and they do not plan to make it available to the general public until “sometime in mid-next year.”
The business just concluded a $2 million pre-seed investment round to support that launch. It featured BAM Ventures, Sophia Amoruso of the Trust Fund, XRC Ventures, Fab Ventures, Yale Index Ventures, CMDN, Dash VC, and a collection of angel investors, including Jennifer Dulski. Heather Gorham of Flying Fish Ventures oversaw it.
Initially, mid-sized fashion and beauty firms that oversee thousands of comments on their social media pages will be the focus of Nectar AI. Its technical and AI teams will grow thanks to the additional funding.
Brands that are investing extensively in both sponsored and organic efforts on social media and have a respectable level of interaction are our ideal clients, according to Misbah Uraizee. “We are currently attempting to balance how brands across the funnel receive Nectar, as they have a huge burning problem around this.”
