Misbah Uraizee and Farah U., co-founders of Nectar, an agentic operating system built for modern brands and retailers, will speak at OPEN Silicon Valley Forum 2026 on November 7 at Santa Clara Convention Center, sharing what building an AI company together actually looks like beneath the headline version of startup success. Their framing pushes back directly against the popular narrative that AI startups achieve overnight breakthroughs, pointing instead to the years of groundwork that typically precede any visible success story, a perspective grounded in their own experience building Nectar from the ground up.
Nectar has raised more than 40 million dollars, with backing from Google Ventures and the Menlo x Anthropic Anthology fund, giving the company institutional credibility from two of the more selective names currently investing in AI infrastructure. That combination of investors, a major venture firm alongside a fund tied directly to Anthropic, signals that Nectar’s agentic approach to retail and brand operations has drawn interest from both traditional venture capital and AI-native capital sources, a distinction that increasingly matters as investors differentiate between AI-wrapped products and genuinely agentic systems built around foundation model capabilities.
At the Forum, Uraizee and Farah will focus specifically on what it means to build a company together as co-founders, alongside broader lessons for the next generation of entrepreneurs watching how today’s AI-native founders are approaching company building. That co-founder dynamic is a detail that startup coverage often glosses over in favor of product and funding milestones, even though how founding teams navigate shared decision-making, disagreement, and division of responsibility frequently determines whether a company survives its early years long enough to reach the kind of traction Nectar has achieved.
The session sits within OPEN Silicon Valley Forum 2026’s broader programming aimed at connecting global entrepreneurs with the operators and investors actively shaping the AI landscape, giving attendees direct access to founders who have navigated the earlier, less visible stages of building an AI company before reaching their current scale. For entrepreneurs in Pakistan’s diaspora-connected startup community following Silicon Valley’s AI funding trends, Nectar’s trajectory offers a concrete data point on what venture-backed, agentic AI products are proving capable of raising and building toward as the category matures. Tickets are available through the event’s registration link.
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