Five Start-ups join VentureNursery acceleration Program: Season-3

VentureNursery, India’s first angel-backed start-up accelerator, has kicked off its 3rd Acceleration program with five unique start ups--Catapooolt, ileathergraph, Peter’s Pan, Perspective.ly and Trelta.

Mr Shravan Shroff, Co founder, VentureNursery said, “The third acceleration batch at VentureNursey is unique as all the selected entrepreneurs have valuable previous work-experience and their ventures have already made a mark in their respective sectors.”

VentureNursery’s 3rd batch of start-ups will undergo intense and customized mentoring by an elite group of serial entrepreneurs, angels members, VCs, technologists and senior corporate managers. As a part of the 13-week program they will be presenting to the group of angel investors of VentureNursery on the ‘Pitch day’ for raising seed investment.

VentureNursery received over 150 applications from Media, Retail, Consumer Technology and e-Business from start-ups in 29 cities. Most of the applicants were from Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore and about a third came from Tier- 2 cities like Gurgaon, Indore, Bhopal and Pune.

The third batch of selected start-ups, are listed in alphabetical order:

Catapooolt: crowd-funding platform

Catapooolt, the world's first crowd funding platform focused on Movies, Music and Entertainment projects, offering a 3-tier reward system, connects creative Asian entrepreneurs to global diaspora. Creative entrepreneurs will use it to get funding and mentoring support, whereas the communities and masses will use it because of rewards associated with their contribution.

The idea bridges the gap between the young talent from the Asian film and entertainment industry and the Non Residents, who have high disposable incomes and a strong emotional connect to their roots. The platform was launched in March 2013 in partnership with the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s finance forum.

Catapooolt ’s team has over 3 decades of experience in media and entertainment, international film marketing and entrepreneurial development. Satish Kataria, founder and MD of Catapooolt, was the operational manager of VistaarReligare while the other co-founder and Associate Director, Yogesh Karikurve picked up valuable experience in international film distribution at Reliance Big Pictures and in marketing at Ogilvy, L’Oreal, Zoom TV and Britannia.

iLeathergraph: personalised leather products company

iLeathergraph, an identity theme based small leather products brand, aspires to capture a big pie of the leather products market. It specialises in transcribing the Customer Identity, Autograph or Monogram designs on the product and making its products remarkable and exceptional.

iLeathergraph’s personalised products are used for travel, mobile phones, digital gadgets, business accessories as well as the traditional categories like wallets and bags .

It is founded by Rattan Joneja, a former Venture Capitalist with a vision to establish world’s leading leather brand with personalised angle. A trained Chartered Accountant, Rattan promoted Marigold Capital Management, a Venture Capital Company which invested in Ajax Software, Trigent Software, Nirlep, Innomedia and G4 Software Technologies.

Perspective.ly: News recommendation system

Perspective.ly uses technology to better collate information. Their key product--a recommendation system for news--is targeted at online publishers, blogs and media houses. By using machine learning and natural language processing techniques, the recommendation engine will direct readers to other related articles, helping them gain an informed perspective on a chosen topic. The company hopes to increase user engagement and trust of publishers by providing contextual recommendations and not just personalized content.

An effective recommendation system can help increase time spent on site, click through rate and reader trust, which leads to higher ad CPM value. Amazon, Netflix and IMDB have leveraged the power of a good recommendation system to create their own standing on the web.

The founder Ankit Goel is an artificial intelligence expert with a Masters in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Peter’s Pan: a Pune-based quick-service restaurant

Peter’s Pan is a Quick Service Restaurant that offers all day dining options for all age groups, prepared hygienically and at affordable prices. It offers all meals viz breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as snacks. Peter’s Pan offers lip-smacking wholesome food ranging from eggs, pancakes, waffles to pastas, pizzas and exotic meals.

All day western style Breakfast and Brunch are fast becoming popular across age groups. For a growing urban population such options are currently available at Star restaurants only. Peter’s Pan plans to bridge the gap for this demand.

Located in the student city of Pune, the company plans to take the concept Pan India through a mix of company owned outlets and franchisees. The first Peter’s Pan outlet opened in Wanowarie in Pune and the second outlet was opened on Fergusson College Road. The third outlet is planned for Viman Nagar in Pune.

The founder Amit Sharma, a serial entrepreneur, launched Peter’s Pan after exiting Eggsunday! a food outlet in Mumbai-Pune expressway.

Trelta: an online patient management platform

Trelta aims to make healthcare easy and accessible for everyone in India, by connecting doctors, patients, laboratories and pharmacies. Trelta, recently launched a practice building tool for doctors, which is a web based desktop with apps.

Designed to solve small pain points for doctors and having unique multitasking abilities, this simple online app will provide private practitioners with powerful tools to organize and provide better service to patients.

The co-founders, Varun Achar and Vaishali Singh, were part of the R&D team at Zycus Infotech Pvt. Ltd. and the core team of India’s No.1 social network for families--imlee.com. With a vision to connect healthcare providers and consumers, Trelta aspires to provide centralized and easy access to healthcare services.