Internet startups Oravel, Shopveg complete VentureNursery's accelerator programme; Next batch to start in November

Angel-backed startup accelerator VentureNursery has announced the completion of one its first accelerator programmes. The ongoing session including two startups – Oravel and Shopveg – will be completed on August 31.

VentureNursery offers 6-13 weeks of customised acceleration programme for startups and as per its procedure, each participating company is evaluated during the first week in order to identify key gaps and challenge areas. The evaluation is done by angels-in-residence and incubation experts. These challenge areas are then addressed through multiple mentoring sessions conducted by an elite group of serial entrepreneurs, charter angels, VCs, technologists and senior corporate managers. Recently, VentureNursery has announced some reputed names who have joined its board as advisors-in-residence. In May this year, the accelerator also announced that as many as 12 angel investors were joining them for the Charter Angels programme.

VentureNursery's first batch started in mid-July and is currently under acceleration. Both startups have undergone nearly 150 hours of mentoring by the angels-in-residence, advisors-in-residence, charter angels and reputed domain experts. In addition, both startups will pitch to the charter angels for raising seed investment after the completion of the accelerator programme.

Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, executive vice-president of VentureNursery, said, "We are satisfied with it "the way our inaugural batch has progressed. We chose quality over volume and this allowed our advisors, part of the core proposition of VentureNursery, to spend quality time with our startups over multiple sessions and guide them step by step. We want to thank all our advisors for their efforts."

Of the startups, Oravel.com is an aggregator of bed & breakfast establishments, private rooms and serviced apartments with the focus on short and mid-term rental. The company is currently targeting Delhi-NCR and enables travellers to book clean, comfortable and affordable spaces.

Shopveg.in is an e-tailer of vegetables, fruit and grocery, and the company is planning to launch more value-added services in the near future.

According to Ritesh Agrawal, co-founder of Oravel, "This is one of the best platforms to evolve businesses with help from experienced professionals, entrepreneurs and potential investors. This platform has given a definite direction to my dream."

"VentureNursery works like a partner during the acceleration programme, connects you to the people whom we could have never reached individually and offers high quality input that reminded us of our IIT days," said Saurabh Dhapodkar, co-founder of Shopveg.

VentureNursery was founded in March this year by Shravan Shroff, founder and former MD of Fame Cinemas, and Ravi Kiran, former CEO (South & South-east Asia) of Starcom MediaVest Group and co-founder and managing Partner of Friends of Ambition. Early-stage funds like Kae Capital and YourNest Angel Fund have also participated in its Charter Angels Programme.

Currently, VentureNursery runs two programmes – a 90-day boot camp and the ParallelTrack programme. While the former focuses on fresh startups, the latter is meant for more mature companies who need not go through the entire 90-day boot camp. Sharma has told Techcircle.in that they are also looking to launch another programme for really fresh startups.

Entries for the second batch of the current programme would be accepted from September and the next session will kick off in November after initial evaluation. There is no pre-set number for the upcoming batch, but the accelerator does not accommodate more than 8 startups for any programme, according to Sharma. Although designed to be sector-agnostic in the long run, VentureNursery currently focuses on six sectors – media & entertainment, retail, e-commerce, consumer technology, education and clean tech.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)