Two start-ups with innovative ideas selected for the 13-week acceleration program are Gig-it, a social event discovery platform, and Tyre Express, a business to business (B2B) marketplace for lifecycle management for commercial vehicle tyres.

 Gig-it, is the brainchild of husband and wife duo Kamal Trilok Singh, an advertising and marketing professional and a passionate stand-up comedian and Akshata Agarwal, an investment banker. Gig-it, a social event discovery platform, will address needs of all those who don’t know what to do with their evenings or free time. Gig-it helps discover interesting events based on individual interests and passion.

Akshata and Kamal’s research showed that lack of information about gigs, their overall quality, pricing and long distances discouraged many from venturing beyond a movie or going out for a meal.

By replacing multiple searches with one consolidated view, Gig-it aims to organise this segment and hopes to make their going out easy and exciting for people. Given Akshata and Kamal’s close association with artists, events industry, venues across India and thanks to their comedy club 'The Awkward Fruit’, it will be easy for them to build an innovative solution.

“We were clear that we needed to learn. And from experienced people…those who had been there and done it all with a passion for nurturing start-ups,” said Akshata.

The selected start-ups will have access to a pool of 80 experienced mentors from a variety of business areas and 30 VentureNursery members who will, question business assumptions, help point out gaps, draw attention to potential minefields and prepare them to draw lessons for real world issues as they scale business.

The second start-up, Tyre Express, will work with its partners to offer a range of financial solutions for sourcing Tyres and leverage technology to enable lifecycle management for Tyres.

The start-up has been founded by three school mates and buddies who immersed themselves in engineering, strategic consulting and public administration.

Dinesh Wakale spent seven years as part of L&T M&A and engineering team and ran a venture for supplying on-demand concrete and products. Over the last eight years, Brijesh Shukla gained experience in Strategic Consulting and Business Development while working with Deloitte and CRISIL. For Vinit Palkar, who served as a Municipal Corporator at the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation for a five year term 2010-15, Tyre Express is a second venture that he is building.

The VentureNursery program will help the founders refine their business model and address specific start-up challenges.

“We chose to join VentureNursery program as it is an excellent platform with access to high quality mentors and designed to help us address specific challenges for scaling our business,” said Dinesh Wakale.

VentureNursery (VN), India’s first angel-backed start-up accelerator, aims to prepare start-ups and founders for #PolePosition.

VentureNursery was established in March 2012 by two like-minded Angel Investors--Shravan Shroff, Founder and former MD, Fame Cinemas and Ravi Kiran, former CEO-South East & South Asia, Starcom MediaVest Group, Co-Founder, Friends of Ambition and Co-Founder, DazzleToday.