Nectar Social has secured $10.6 million in funding to address fragmented social media management for consumer brands. The Seattle-based startup, founded in 2023, provides an AI-powered platform that unifies social listening, community engagement, and revenue generation in a single operating system.

Founded by sisters Misbah and Farah Uraizee, Nectar Social serves beauty brands, CPG companies, health and wellness businesses, and airlines that need to manage their presence across multiple social platforms. The company emerged from the founders’ observations that brands are struggling with disjointed workflows while facing increasing pressure to build direct relationships with consumers.

“We are the agentic social operating system for brands,” explains Misbah, who’s also the CEO. “We are listening to all of the video content to help brands understand what is being said, what the products are that are being talked about, and what the sentiment is in real time.”

After spending years at Meta as a product leader working on recommendations platforms and brand criteria, Misbah gained firsthand insight into shifting consumer behaviors and brand challenges. Farah, who was also at Meta but on the engineering side, brought complementary technical expertise to the partnership when they co-founded Nectar.

“I think there are a lot of interesting inflection points that came about,” Misbah notes when asked about the company’s origins. “As a brand, we’re obviously doubling down on our ad strategy, but now we’re realizing that the best and fastest growing businesses are actually having a direct connection with their consumers, and are very community driven.”

The timing proved opportune as several market factors converged: the post-pandemic rise of TikTok, Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes affecting ad targeting, and a growing focus on community-driven marketing among brands. These shifts created a gap in the market that existing solutions weren’t addressing adequately.

“If you go back far enough, the technology wasn’t fully there, and the platforms in themselves were also developing,” Misbah explains. “TikTok wasn’t really a pre-pandemic thing to the same extent that it is now.”

A Vote of Confidence

The recent $10.6 million investment reflects growing market recognition of the problem Nectar Social is solving. What’s particularly notable about this funding round is how quickly it materialized.

“We were not actively looking to do a big raise or even fundraise at all,” Misbah recalls. “The round came together in the matter of two weeks, and it was so fast that we didn’t even have time to create a pitch deck.”

The investment was led by True Ventures, with partner Tony Conrad, and Google Ventures, with partner Frederique Dame. Each investor brings strategic value beyond capital. True Ventures offers a strong founder community and portfolio connections, while Google Ventures provides product expertise and connections to Google’s AI capabilities.

“It really came down to the partners at the table and how we’re synergizing with them,” explains Misbah. “Tony is a legend in this space. He was the first legend in the Web 1.0 era. So, he’s seen businesses grow; he’s also seen where businesses fail. He’s seen how to get ahead of things that might be around the corner.”

Solving Three Core Challenges for Brands

Nectar Social’s platform addresses three main challenges brands face in managing their social media presence. First, it creates an AI knowledge base that understands a brand’s voice, products, and communication style. This foundation enables intelligent social listening across video content.

“Brands need to understand what products are being discussed in real time,” Misbah explains. “It’s huge from the product safety perspective to understand, ‘Okay, we just launched something on Tuesday. How many consumers are complaining about the formula in this? How many consumers actually love it?’”

The second core component enables proactive community engagement, allowing brands to identify and interact with relevant content across platforms. Misbah describes this as “the Duolingo strategy on crack,” referring to the language app’s famous social media engagement tactics, but made accessible to any business.

The third and perhaps most valuable component is connecting social interactions directly to revenue. “People don’t really know anything about the people that are engaging with them,” Misbah notes. “We’re helping them identify them, we’re helping them nurture them, we’re helping them maintain those relationships directly inside of these social platforms.”

This approach enables marketing teams to distinguish between genuine super fans and bot accounts, quantify the revenue value of their community, and benchmark their performance against competitors.

AI-Powered Customer Engagement

Nectar utilizes an AI system that can replicate a brand’s unique voice. The platform includes an “AI personality brand voice studio” where brands can define exactly how they want to communicate.

“We have a whole AI personality brand voice studio where they can say, ‘This is a representation of how we talk. This is how we interact with our community,’” Misbah explains.

This capability allows for consistent communication across all channels, from public comments to direct messages, while maintaining the brand’s tone. As Misbah shares, Nectar’s customers typically see north of 85% AI-assisted engagement within the first month of onboarding, freeing marketing teams to focus on strategy rather than repetitive tasks.

“Every time they run a campaign, especially in DMs where they’re able to drive a high amount of revenue, we see north of 90% open rates,” Misbah reveals. In one example, a CPG brand launching a new drink flavor achieved a 45% conversion rate through Nectar, which, as Misbah notes, is significantly higher than the conversion rates typically achieved through traditional email or SMS marketing campaigns.

Strategic Growth Plans

With the new funding secured, Nectar has clear plans for expansion. The capital will be invested in three key areas: continued product development, strategic team growth, and geographic expansion with a new hub in New York City.

“You’re going to start seeing more announcements from us coming in during the fall period, which is very exciting,” Misbah shares. “There’s product development that’s going to be continuous, but also just expanding the team a little bit further as well in the right areas.”

The company is specifically focusing on strengthening its AI leadership team and client-facing strategic roles. The establishment of a NYC presence will complement their Seattle headquarters and better position them to serve East Coast clients.

“It is more on the go-to-market side and a little bit on the technical, engineering, and product side as well that we’ll be hiring, as well as one or two in the marketing space,” Misbah says.

New Products and Preparations

The funding comes at a crucial time as Nectar prepares for the busy fourth quarter—traditionally the most intense period for consumer brands—and develops new product offerings scheduled for rollout soon.

“We’re going into a very busy season for brands. It’s July and they’re thinking about the fall. September is going to be an inflection point, and then November is going to be crazy,” Misbah explains. “Last year, Q4 was insane for us both because we’re in this business right there alongside our customers.”

While details of the upcoming product launches remain under wraps, they align with the company’s vision of further streamlining workflows for marketing teams and increasing automation capabilities.

“We have new product launches that are in the pipeline that I can’t share too much about right now, but lots and lots of exciting things that we want to announce in September,” Misbah hints.

From Assistance to Agency

Beyond immediate plans, Nectar Social is working toward a future where AI not only assists marketing teams but also changes how they operate. Misbah envisions a platform that fully automates routine tasks, enabling marketing professionals to focus on higher-value, strategic work.

“Long term, we’re going to keep building towards our vision to be the end-to-end social operating system for these businesses,” she explains. “The first phase of AI companies was very much on the AI assistant side. Now we’re in the second phase where we are agentizing all of these workflows.”

According to her, this shift from assistance to agency represents the next step in AI applications for marketing. “We want to first make sure we’re hitting all their workflows in a single platform and then focusing on higher ROI strategies,’” Misbah elaborates.

For Misbah personally, being a founder has been both challenging and rewarding. The pace of growth requires constant learning of new skills and adaptation to new phases of the business.

“Being an early-stage company, every quarter you’re in the next phase of growth, and so you’re completely thrown into the fire,” she reflects. “You wake up every morning, you’re like, ‘There are a thousand things I need to do and they can’t happen fast enough.’”

What sustains her through these challenges is seeing the impact on customers. “Customers always put a smile on our faces on a daily basis,” she says. “What drives me is making sure that I’m actually solving a real problem. I can see that impact quickly.”

Nectar Social’s funding positions it to continue establishing stronger connections between brands and their communities while driving business results.

“If you’re not investing in social, you’re missing out,” Misbah concludes. “If consumers are spending multiple hours a day on these platforms, you want to be there.”

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