Nectar Social, founded by two former Meta executive sisters, Misbah and Farah Uraizee, recently completed a $10.6 million round of financing, co-led by True Ventures and GV. The company is using AI technology to reshape the way brands interact with consumers, upgrading social media from a mere marketing channel to a complete sales system.
Are you still worried about the fact that no one clicks on your ad? Are you still struggling with why the digital marketing effect of spending huge amounts of money is getting worse and worse? The reality is that the traditional marketing funnel has completely collapsed. Today’s consumers, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, have completely changed the way they discover products: no longer through search engines or ads, but through scrolling on TikTok, searches on Reddit, or recommendations from influencers. They discover brands on social media, ask questions in the comments section, and place orders in private messages. This is not a future trend, but a reality that is happening.
It was against this backdrop that two former Meta executive sisters, Misbah and Farah Uraizee, left the tech giant to found Nectar Social. They just announced the completion of a $10.6 million round of financing, led by True Ventures and GV (Google Ventures). Behind this round of financing is the recognition of a new business model: social media is no longer just a marketing channel, but a complete sales system. What’s more, they are using AI agents to completely reshape the way brands interact with consumers. I believe this represents the next decade of e-commerce and digital marketing.
The complete collapse of the traditional marketing funnel
I’ve been pondering the question: why do brands that invest millions of dollars in digital advertising have lower conversion rates? Why are consumers becoming more immune to email marketing and SMS promotion? The answer is simple: consumer behavior patterns have changed drastically, but most brands are still reaching them the way they did a decade ago.
Misbah was blunt in an interview: “The days of traditional marketing funnels are over. “She was right. The linear process of “cognitive-interest-consider-purchase” in the past is now replaced by a more complex and social purchase path. Consumers may see a product video on TikTok, immediately ask about the user experience in the comment area, then directly send a private message to the brand to inquire about the purchase details, and finally complete the transaction in Instagram DM. The entire process may only take a few minutes, skipping the traditional advertising and website conversion links altogether.
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Behind this shift is a shocking statistic: According to Salesforce research, 76% of Gen Z consumers discover products through social media. Not through Google searches, not through the official website of the brands, but through the social platforms where they spend hours a day. What’s more, these consumers are more resistant to traditional advertising forms than ever before. They skip ads, ignore emails, block push notifications. But they are willing to spend time interacting with brands in the comment area, consulting product details in DMs, and sharing real experiences.
As I observe this change, I’ve found that the most successful brands tend not to run the most ads, but to be the most active and authentic on social media. They respond to every comment, actively participate in user discussions, and communicate with consumers in a human tone. But the problem is that this kind of high-quality social interaction is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming. A medium-sized brand may need to deal with hundreds or thousands of comments, DMs, and mentions every day, each of which requires a timely and appropriate response. This is the core problem that Nectar Social is trying to solve.
Farah cites a key insight in their product introduction: “Consumers spend more than two hours a day in messaging apps, but brands have almost zero presence in this space. “The value of this blank market is enormous. When consumers ask for product information in DMs, they are already at the critical point of purchase, and as long as brands can respond in a timely and accurate manner, the conversion rate will far exceed that of traditional email marketing.
This explains why their early customers were able to achieve a 12% conversion rate in DMs, compared to the industry average of 1-3% for email marketing. It’s not that the product itself has any magic, but that they have found channels where consumers are really willing to interact and amplify the effect of this interaction with AI technology.
Triple innovation at Nectar Social
After diving deeper into Nectar Social’s products, I realized that their innovation lies not only in technology but also in their deep understanding of the essence of social commerce. Their platform mainly solves three core problems, each of which directly addresses the pain points faced by current brands.
The first innovation is AI-powered community management. Traditional social media management is often reactive: brands wait for users to speak up and then respond in a hurry. However, Nectar’s AI copilot can actively monitor all social activities related to the brand, including not only direct @mentions, but also discussions on related topics, comparisons of competitors, and even subtle changes in user sentiment. What’s more, the AI system is trained to mimic the brand’s tone and style, ensuring a consistent brand image in every interaction.
I particularly appreciate their meticulous consideration in AI training. Farah mentioned that AI needs to understand the cultural differences of different platforms: the interactive style on TikTok is more casual and entertaining, while Instagram’s tone may be more refined and branded, and Facebook needs a more formal and professional way of communicating. The same brand needs to show different personalities on different platforms, and this meticulous personalization needs cannot be met by traditional tools.
The second innovation is real-time insights and early warning systems. What brands fear most is the sudden outburst of negative public opinion, but traditional monitoring tools often lag by hours or even days. Nectar’s AI analyzes video content, comment sentiment, and topic trends in real-time, alerting you when negative sentiment doesn’t even take shape. What’s even more powerful is that this system can not only tell you that “something is wrong”, but also analyze the root cause of the problem and provide specific response suggestions.
I’ve learned from talking to brands that many companies spend a lot of time manually checking UGC content every week to determine what is good for forwarding, what needs to be responded to, and what might pose risks. Nectar can automate this process and even recognize the content at a specific point in time in the video to tell the brand what triggered the user’s emotional response. This level of precision is of immeasurable value for brands that rely on social media reputation.
The third innovation, and I think is the most revolutionary, is full-funnel revenue attribution. In the past, social media ROI has been a black box. Brands know that users are active on social platforms, but it can be difficult to prove how much actual sales this activity actually generates. Through advanced data tracking technology, Nectar is able to connect every social interaction (comment, DM, share) to the final purchase behavior.
The value of this attribution is not only to prove the effectiveness of social marketing, but also to optimize marketing strategies. Brands can clearly see which types of content are most likely to drive purchases, which users are the most valuable brand advocates, and which influencer collaborations are actually driving conversions. In a business environment where ROI is increasingly valued, this precise data tracking capability has transformed social marketing from an “art” to a “science.”
I learned that their client, OLIPOP, not only achieved a DM response rate of over 80% through the Nectar platform, but also clearly tracked the contribution of each social interaction to the final sale. This transparency allows brands to dive into social marketing with greater confidence, as they can finally demonstrate a tangible return on those investments.
In-depth insights behind sister entrepreneurship
I’ve always been interested in the background of startup teams, as the founder’s experience often determines the company’s vision and execution. The experiences of sisters Misbah and Farah give them a unique advantage in understanding the complex field of social commerce.
Misbah spent the early years of his career at Microsoft, transitioning from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella, involved in the growth of Office 365, and later responsible for the launch of HoloLens AR/VR products. This experience gave her a deep understanding of the complexities of enterprise-level products and how cutting-edge technology can be turned into practical tools. More importantly, her experience in product management allows her to think about technology solutions from the perspective of user needs.
Farah focused on engineering and AI technology, joining Meta after studying AI at Stanford, where he was responsible for the growth of community products for Instagram and Facebook. Her in-depth research into messaging as a channel for user growth has allowed her to see a huge opportunity for brands in this area. During her six years at Meta, she has seen firsthand how the DM feature has gone from an affiliate feature to a core feature with the highest user engagement.
But I think their biggest advantage comes not only from their technical background, but also from their cooperation model as sisters. Since middle school, they have been doing website development side hustle together, providing customized web solutions for customers. When Misbah was 12 years old, he developed a complete e-commerce website for a jewelry store for $5,000, and the customer didn’t even know that the other party was just a 12-year-old girl.
Their parents mentioned an interesting detail in an interview: the sisters have a peculiarity since childhood, love to argue heatedly, but as soon as one of them gets into trouble, the other will immediately drop everything to help. This relationship of “each other’s biggest critics and each other’s biggest supporters” has become a huge advantage in the entrepreneurial process.
I find that many great entrepreneurial teams have similar traits: being able to be honest about problems and support each other when it matters most. This complementary collaborative model is particularly important for companies like Nectar Social that need to handle both technical complexities and business strategies.
Their overlapping work experiences at Meta are also interesting. Although they are responsible for products and engineering separately, they often have lunch on the same floor, which allows them to observe the same issues from different angles. This experience helped them understand how to collaborate within big tech companies and the limitations of existing tools. As Farah says, “Brands need one tool for social listening, another for replying, and a third tool for insights and management. But in reality, these are different pieces of an overall puzzle. ”
From virality to interaction at scale
One of my thoughts particularly resonated with Misbah: she said she would write a book in the future called “Manufacturing Virality.” She insists that virality can be made and that there are specific playbooks to follow. This perspective challenges many people’s traditional perception of social media marketing.
In most people’s eyes, content going viral is a process full of chance, and you can never predict what will suddenly explode. But Misbah takes a different view: while you can’t guarantee that every piece of content will go viral, you can create the conditions and environment for it to go viral. The playbook includes selective interaction, search optimization, partnerships with micro-influencers, content seeding, offline campaign coordination, and the use of interactive tools like polls, DMs, and more to stimulate user engagement.
I think the value of this view is that it changes social media marketing from “trying your luck” to “being strategic.” The best brands are “super active” and not only reply to every user, but also actively encourage more interaction. This proactive approach is something that traditional marketing tools cannot support, as human management simply cannot achieve this scale and speed.
But there’s a key balance here: while virality can be “made,” it still has to come from a real place. Consumers can perceive the sincerity of a brand, and if they create content just to go viral, it will be counterproductive. That’s why instead of simply generating responses in bulk, Nectar’s AI system learns from the brand’s authentic voice and values, ensuring that every interaction remains authentic.
I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon: the brands that are most successful on social media tend to have one characteristic: they prioritize building organic communities. As Misbah says, “For all of our customers, the organic community is the hardest. You can pay for more reach and scale with placements, but your organic traction — your organic community and how you perform in it — is the truest representation of your brand and determines how much viral potential your content has. ”
This emphasis on organic communities reflects a deeper shift in business logic: from pursuing short-term advertising results to building long-term customer relationships. In this transformation, AI’s role is not to replace human creativity, but to amplify human ability to build authentic relationships.
Investors’ strategic vision
Frédérique Dame, partner at GV, is interesting about Nectar Social’s investment logic. She mentioned a key observation: “Brands are inundated with DMs and reviews, and they need to convert customers immediately on the spot. When customers ask questions about products, they are ready to buy. Nectar is shortening the actual conversion funnel for instant purchases. ”
This insight reveals a core feature of social commerce: timeliness. In the traditional e-commerce model, customers may have days or even weeks to think about it from interest to final purchase. But in the social media environment, buying decisions are often instantaneous. When users see a product while scrolling through a video, they immediately have the urge to buy, and if the brand can’t respond to their inquiry within minutes, the purchase opportunity may be lost forever.
Tony Conrad of True Ventures echoes a similar sentiment: “Consumer behavior has fundamentally shifted to a social-first discovery model, where purchase decisions begin with social content, flow through the community, and are driven by personalized conversations. But most brands still use disconnect tools that were born for this reality. ”
I think these investor judgments reflect a larger trend: the business world as a whole is moving from product-centric to relationship-centric. In a product-centric world, brands focus on making better products and then telling consumers through advertising; In a relationship-centric world, brands focus on creating authentic connections with consumers, and products are just vehicles for that relationship.
This shift poses significant challenges for traditional retail and e-commerce companies. They need to rethink organizational structures, budget allocation, talent acquisition, and even company culture. A brand that relies on traditional advertising to move to a social-first model is not just about changing a marketing tool, but about reinventing the entire way customers are engaged.
In this transformation, platforms like Nectar Social play a key role: they not only provide technical tools, but more importantly, a new operating model. Brands no longer have to guess what content will work, manually manage thousands of user interactions, or rely on vague marketing metrics. They can make decisions based on real data and operate on a large scale based on AI support.
Inspiration from customer cases
I pay special attention to Nectar Social’s customer choice, as early adopters tend to represent the direction of the industry. They have worked with brands such as OLIPOP (a health soda brand), Jones Road Beauty (a beauty brand founded by Bobbi Brown), Tower28 (a viral California beauty brand) and Solawave (a skincare device brand). These brands have one thing in common: they are a new generation of consumer brands that have risen rapidly through social media.
Take OLIPOP, for example, a functional soda brand that has become a star in the field of health drinks in just a few years. Much of their success comes from organic communication on social media: fitness gurus share their drinking experiences, nutritionists recommend their recipes, and regular consumers shoot unboxing videos. But as brand awareness grows, the number of social interactions they need to handle every day has grown exponentially, and human responses alone are no longer realistic.
The case of Jones Road Beauty is even more interesting. As legendary makeup artist Bobbi Brown’s new brand, they have adopted a social-first strategy from the start. Instead of relying on traditional beauty advertising, they build brand influence through authentic educational content and user interaction. The success of this strategy is a testament to the idea that in an era of information overload, authenticity is more important than production value.
With the Nectar platform, these brands achieved some impressive stats: over 80% DM response rate, average 5-minute response time, and 12% DM conversion rate. But I think more important are the qualitative advantages they gain: deeper customer understanding, stronger brand loyalty, and faster product iteration.
I noticed an interesting detail: these brands have a total of over 1.8 million followers on Instagram, but their value lies not only in their fan size, but also in their fan activity and engagement. In the traditional marketing system, we focus on reach and impression; In the age of social commerce, we focus more on engagement and conversion. This transformation of the indicator system reflects a fundamental change in the business model.
A new paradigm in influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has always been an important part of social commerce, but I find that most brands are extremely inefficient in executing in this area. The traditional influencer collaboration process is full of manual tasks: finding the right influencer, negotiating the terms of the partnership, sending products, tracking performance, and calculating ROI. Every step is error-prone and extremely time-consuming.
I am impressed by Nectar Social’s innovation in this area. Not only did they automate the Influencer communication process, but they also solved a problem that had plagued brands for a long time: how to accurately track the true effectiveness of Influencer collaborations. In the past, brands relied primarily on discount codes to track conversions, but this approach has significant flaws: codes are prone to leakage, users may not use codes but are still influenced by influencer recommendations, and long-term brand impact cannot be tracked.
I learned about a beauty brand that managed partnerships with more than 1,500 influencers through the Nectar platform. In the past, it took two full-time employees three months to gather Influencer’s address and product preference information; Now, this process is fully automated, which not only saves labor costs but also greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of data.
What’s more, Nectar is able to distinguish between different levels of influencer cooperation models. Some influencers just accept free products, some require paid collaborations, and some are long-term ambassadors for brands. Different cooperation models require different communication strategies and tracking methods, which are difficult for traditional tools to achieve.
I especially appreciate the importance they place on micro-influencers. In my opinion, instead of spending a lot of money on a mega-influencer to do a promotion, it is better to build a long-term authentic relationship with 100 micro-influencers. The latter not only costs less but also tends to lead to higher conversion rates, as micro-influencer fans often have a stronger sense of trust and higher engagement.
Farah mentioned a key insight: Influencers prefer to respond to branded messages from Instagram DMs rather than emails. It sounds simple, but it reflects a deep psychological principle: Instagram DMs feel more personal and more like conversations between friends, while emails are clearly business communication. This subtle difference may make or break a cooperation.
Data-driven social strategy
In my interactions with various brands, I found that the biggest confusion about social media marketing is not “how to do it” but “how to prove effectiveness”. The relationship between traditional social media metrics – likes, comments, follower growth – and actual business results is not clear. A video gets 1 million views, but how many sales do it bring? An influencer has 100,000 followers, but does her recommendation really affect the buying decision?
One of Nectar Social’s greatest values is creating a clear connection from social events to business results. Their system tracks the full lifecycle of every social interaction: from a user commenting under a video, to brand replies, to subsequent DM conversations, and ultimately to purchases. This end-to-end tracking capability allows brands to scientifically assess the ROI of social marketing for the first time.
I believe the value of this data capability lies not only in proving past results, but also in guiding future strategies. Brands can clearly see which types of content are most likely to drive purchases, which topics are most likely to inspire user engagement, and which time periods have the highest conversion rates. These insights have changed social marketing from “art” to “science”.
But I also notice an interesting balance: while data is important, over-reliance on data can also stifle creativity. The best social content often comes from genuine emotions and spontaneous interactions, and if everything is optimized by algorithms, it may lose authenticity. Nectar’s approach is clever: they use AI to handle repetitive and scaled tasks, but retain human dominance in creativity and strategy.
Another valuable data dimension is real-time monitoring. Traditional social monitoring tools often have delays of hours or even days, and by the time you find a problem, negative emotions may have spread widely. Nectar’s real-time monitoring capabilities allow brands to act on issues as soon as they are in the bud and nip them in the bud.
I learned about a case where a brand found through the Nectar platform that when one of their products was mentioned on TikTok, users reacted significantly more negatively than on other platforms. After in-depth analysis, it was found that the problem lies in the product packaging: in TikTok’s short video format, a design element of the packaging is easily misunderstood. The brand quickly adjusted its marketing strategy, avoiding a possible PR crisis.
Technical architecture considerations
As an observer of technology developments, I am intrigued by Nectar Social’s technical architecture. Their challenges are multidimensional: they need to process APIs for multiple social platforms simultaneously, analyze large amounts of text and video content in real time, maintain consistency and branding of AI responses, and ensure data security and privacy protection.
In terms of training AI models, I learned that they employ multi-level personalization strategies. The first is platform-level adaptation: TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook each have different language styles and interaction habits. The second is brand-level training: each brand has a unique voice and tone, and AI needs to learn and maintain this consistency. Finally, there’s personalization at the user level: providing customized responses based on the user’s historical interactions, purchase history, and preferences.
This multi-level personalization requires a lot of training data and computing resources, but I think that’s where Nectar has a competitive advantage. Simple chatbots can handle standardized customer service issues, but maintaining brand consistency and user personalization in complex social environments requires a more sophisticated technical architecture.
In terms of data integration, Nectar needs to connect with the brand’s existing systems: e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, email marketing tools, inventory management systems, etc. This comprehensive data integration allows the AI to obtain complete user profiles, providing more accurate and useful interactions. For example, when a user asks about a product, AI not only knows the basic information of the product, but also knows the user’s purchase history, preferences, and inventory status, and can provide more personalized suggestions.
I pay special attention to their real-time performance. Social media is characterized by the rapid spread of information, and users expect immediate responses. If a brand takes hours to respond to a user’s inquiry, it is likely to lose the opportunity to convert. Nectar claims to be able to reduce the average response time to less than 5 minutes, which is technically challenging and requires optimizing the entire data processing and AI inference pipeline.
Another technical challenge is the handling of multimodal content. Today’s social media not only has text, but also pictures, videos, audio and other forms. Users may ask for product details in video reviews or share their experience through images. AI needs to understand these different forms of content and respond appropriately. I was impressed by Nectar’s ability to analyze the specific timing of the video content, identify moments that mention the brand, and even understand the emotions and perspectives conveyed in the video.
A deep impact on the traditional retail industry
I’ve been thinking about a question: how will the traditional retail model change as more and more consumers buy products through social discovery? This is not just a transfer of marketing channels, but a reconstruction of the entire business logic.
In the traditional retail model, the core competitiveness of a brand is product quality, price advantage and channel coverage. But in the era of social commerce, community-building, content creation, and real-time interaction are equally important. A brand with average product quality but good social interaction may be more successful than a brand with excellent products but a weak social presence.
This change poses a huge challenge for established brands. They have deep pockets and mature supply chains, but often lack a socially native mindset. They are used to top-down marketing communications, but social media requires real interaction from the bottom up. Their organizational structures and decision-making processes often fail to adapt to the fast-paced and real-time nature of social media.
I observed an interesting phenomenon: many traditional brands make the same mistake when trying to enter social commerce: they use social media as another advertising channel rather than a community platform. They post the perfect product photo, write a formal brand message, and then expect users to participate. But truly successful social brands do the opposite: they share behind-the-scenes content, respond to every comment, and don’t even mind admitting mistakes in public spaces.
On the other hand, digitally native brands have a natural advantage in this transformation. They have made social interaction a core strategy since their inception, and their team structure, content workflow, and even product development process are designed around social feedback. When they need to scale their social interactions, platforms like Nectar become the perfect solution.
My final thoughts on the social commerce revolution
After delving into Nectar Social and the social commerce space as a whole, I came to the conclusion that we are witnessing a real paradigm shift in business history. This is not a simple upgrade of technology or a adjustment of marketing strategies, but a redefinition of the essence of business relationships.
In the industrial age, businesses gain a competitive advantage through mass production and distribution; In the information age, enterprises gain advantages through data and algorithms; Now, in the social age, the core competency of a company is the ability to build and maintain authentic relationships. This capability requires both human empathy and creativity, as well as the scale and efficiency of AI.
Nectar Social’s success is not only due to the fact that they have built a great technology platform, but also because they understand the nature of business relationships in this era. Consumers no longer want to be “marketed”, they want to be “understood”; they no longer want to be “persuaded”, they want to be “served”; They no longer want to be “target customers”, they want to be “community members”.
I predict that in the next decade, social commerce will go from being an emerging trend to a mainstream business model. Brands that successfully transform will gain a significant competitive advantage, while those that stick to traditional models will be at risk of being marginalized. This shift may be faster than we think, as the spending habits of younger consumer groups have become fully digital and social.
From the perspective of technological development, the application of AI in social commerce is still in its early stages. Today’s AI mainly processes text and simple multimedia content, but future AI will be able to understand more complex emotions, cultural backgrounds, and even individual personality traits. When AI can truly “understand” the unique needs of each consumer, personalization will reach an unprecedented level.
Finally, I would like to say that technology is always just a means, not an end. The true value of Nectar Social and other similar platforms is not in how advanced their AI algorithms are, but in how they help brands build more authentic and meaningful customer relationships. In this increasingly digital world, human connections have become even more precious. Brands that can scale while maintaining a human touch will be the ultimate winners in this new era.
The social commerce revolution has just begun, and Nectar Social is just the vanguard of this revolution. I look forward to seeing more innovators join this revolution and shape the future of business together.” In this future, every interaction is meaningful, every consumer is valuable, and every brand is authentic. Such a business world is worth all of our efforts.
