Non-existence of warped product semi-slant submanifolds of Kaehler manifolds was proved in [17], it is interesting to find their existence. In this paper, we prove the existence of warped product semi-slant submanifolds of nearly Kaehler manifolds by a characterization. To this end we obtain an inequality for the squared norm of second fundamental form in terms of the warping function and the slant angle. The equality case is also discussed.