The hidden social commerce startup leverages Meta’s roots to create AI-powered brand messages

Because consumers’ attention is now directed in many directions, it’s much harder for brands to capture attention for longer than the average scroll time on social media. At the same time, by 2026 the value of purchases made via social media platforms around the world will reach almost $3 trillion.

Nectar AI wants to give direct selling and e-commerce brands an easier way to connect with consumers. The social trading platform was founded by sisters Misbah Uraizee and Farah Uraizee, who saw this problem firsthand when they both worked at Meta.

Misbah built AI-powered conversation and monetization tools for businesses and consumers, while Farah built products on the community and group side of Facebook.

“We created these products to encourage people to spend more time in the Meta ecosystem and quickly realized that they were band-aids at best,” Misbah Uraizee told TechCrunch. “We have observed, especially among Generation Z, a very strong gravitational pull towards private messaging. “Messaging has grown rapidly over the last five years.”

As evidence of this trend, Uraizee pointed to a recent interview with Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, who said that a significant portion of time spent on Meta apps is spent on Stories and direct messaging features.

That’s why the Nectar AI team says brands need to find new ways to personally engage and convert consumers where they spend the most time. The company enables D2C and e-commerce companies to replace six tools they currently use with Nectar, an AI-generated messaging tool that uses large language models and search-aided generation to connect at scale, Farah Uraizee said in an interview.

The company joins other e-commerce companies, including: SuperOrdinary, Loup (formerly Social Chat) and Rebuy. What Uraizees says sets Nectar AI apart is its personalization technology, including identity mapping from customer social media profiles to commerce, and a proprietary commerce-focused LLM that brands can deploy wherever they interact with customers.

If this all sounds great, you’ll have to wait a while before you can try it. According to Misbah Uraizee, the developers still believe that Nectar AI is quite hidden – its product is in beta and will probably not offer it to the public until “the middle of next year,” according to Misbah Uraizee.

To accelerate this launch, the company recently closed a $2 million pre-seed funding round. It was led by Heather Gorham of Flying Fish Ventures and included BAM Ventures, Sophia Amoruso of the trust, XRC Ventures, Fab Ventures, Yale Index Ventures, CMDN, Dash VC and a group of angel investors, including Jennifer Dulski.

Nectar AI will initially target mid-sized fashion and beauty brands that manage thousands of comments on their social media channels. The new capital will help expand engineering teams and artificial intelligence.

“Our sweet spot is for brands that show decent levels of engagement on their social media platforms and that invest heavily on those platforms in their free and paid campaigns,” said Misbah Uraizee. “They have a huge pressing issue with this, and now we’re trying to balance how brands across the funnel receive Nectar.”