Bristol sales tech startup Nesti closes £250k pre-seed funding round

Nesti, an AI-driven platform which provides sales development teams with personalised outbound videos, has secured £250,000 in a competitive pre-seed round led by SFC Capital.

The investment will help the Bristol startup build out its engineering team, accelerate its pace of growth and improve customer support to keep up with demand for its latest product.

Nesti uses generative AI video models to create AI replicas of sales reps, enabling them to produce unique, personal and interactive outbound prospecting videos at scale.

On average, Nesti’s clients have seen a 65 per cent uplift in demos booked and a 300 per cent increase in response rates.

The team say they’re building what Salesloft achieved for email personalisation, but for video prospecting.

This latest oversubscribed fundraise was led by SFC Capital, the London-based Venture Capital firm who have also backed the likes of Cognism and Onfido.

Investment has also come in from some of Nesti’s early clients, which range from high-growth SaaS scaleups to global firms.

A selection of business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing heavyweights have also invested, including renowned marketer Richard Fitzmaurice, durhamlane co-founders Lee Durham and Richard Lane, and Meridian West CEO Ben Kent.

Ed Stevenson, investment executive at SFC Capital, said: “The team at Nesti are building one of the most exciting B2B platforms we have seen recently.

“Nesti is well designed, extremely easy to use and is already proving its effectiveness among sales teams.

“There’s an abundance of potential to not only own the generative AI video prospecting space but also expand into horizontal markets.

“We’re excited to be working with the team as they expand and grow.”

Morgan Edmondson, Co-founder & CEO at Nesti, added: “We’re thrilled that such high calibre investors immediately recognised our ability to drive sales growth for our customers, allowing us to close our pre-seed funding round early.

“The commercial functions of businesses large and small are proving to be hungry for modernisation.

“The speed at which we’ve been able to develop our technology has been matched by the speed of our clients ability to both implement it and see a significant uplift in conversion rates – a very clear indicator of the transformative nature of generative AI video prospecting in outbound sales.

“With our team’s deep understanding of the latest technology, the talent market and need for security, it’s our goal to be the default choice for mid-market and enterprise grade AI sales tech that can add real commercial value, not tomorrow, but right now.”