VentureNursery India's first Investment

Mumbai July 4, 2013:

VentureNursery, India’s first angel-backed start-up accelerator has announced that its  Angels have invested  in Mumbai-based consumer internet company Smursh Ecommerce, the owners of Klip.in, a social discovery and curation tool for e-commerce.

Klip.in helps users discover unique and interesting lifestyle products across the web by aggregating and curating them based on their social connections and interest graph. Klip.in’s steadily growing traffic indicates a high level of consumer interest for over 5000 products curated from over 100 sites. Klip.in has a user base of nearly a thousand members. 

Smursh Ecommerce Pvt. Ltd. was founded in 2011 by college friends Harsh Gadia and Maneesh Madambath. The duo, have been running a media agency, Smursh Media, for the past five years. With KLIP, they intend to bring their experience and insights in managing online brands and communities into the consumer internet space.

KLIP is a Season-2 graduate of VentureNursery’s acceleration program that concluded in April 2013.

Mr Harsh Gadia said, “Social media tools such as DIGG that organize content and help users discover them have been growing for the last few years. We now see a similar opportunity in e-Commerce, especially in the fashion and lifestyle product space.  With 1000 plus e-Commerce sites and millions of products being sold online, product discovery is a huge challenge that needs to be addressed.”

KLIP’s larger agenda is to connect people with products they like, regardless of where those products are. Klip.in’s tool is platform independent as it is looking to tap the mobile segment.

The funds will be used to build technical resources for product features and building initial user base.

Mr Shravan Shroff, Co-founder, VentureNursery said, “Our Angels saw the  team, their strong digital and entrepreneurial background being critical elements for building a business out of this opportunity. Additionally, VentureNursery Angels were struck by the exceptional business building capability of founding team of KLIP. ”

The curation and social foundations of KLIP make it a very exciting opportunity. KLIP applies social media tool to better serve the e-shoppers, thus organising the e-Commerce business.

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About VentureNursery [@venturenursery]

Venture Nursery (VN) is India’s first angel-backed start-up accelerator.  It 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 and Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Friends of Ambition.

Based on its belief that the angel ecosystem must focus primarily on maximising the success potential of the start-ups, VentureNursery undertakes an intensive and immersive coaching and mentoring role in the chosen start-ups and helps each with end-to-end infrastructural and learning support.

VentureNursery conducts a minimum of two boot camps in a year in Mumbai and targets to accommodate up to eight start-ups in each program. At the end of each boot camp, successfully graduating start-ups will be evaluated for investment by a group of committed angel investors. In addition to the Boot Camp program, Venture Nursery also accepts start-ups for acceleration through its parallel track program.

Although designed to be sector agnostic in the long run, VentureNursery at present focuses on six sectors – Media & Entertainment, Retail, e-Commerce, Consumer Technology, Education and CleanTech.

In addition to the Angels-in-Residence and Charter Angels, Venture Nursery works with Advisors-in-Residence and Executives-in-Residence to provide complete support to the start-ups.
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www.venturenursery.com

Notes to the Editor:

Smursh Media: is a 5- year old Digital Media firm based out of Bombay. College friends Harsh Gadia and Maneesh Madambath began their career at an Internet solutions firm together, before quitting a year into their jobs to build a web based business of their own. They joined hands after a string of ideas to start Smursh (www.smursh.com), as a full service Digital marketing agency in 2008.

Smursh specializes in integrated Digital Strategies for brands which includes platform development, content creation and management. Smursh has helped Walt Disney, Cox and Kings, Penguin India, Future Group, Viacom 18 among others connect with their customers and users through engaging and interactive digital marketing solutions. Smursh has been able to tap into digital media trends early and in fact created one of the first web based reality show for Viacom 18 which went on to win a Silver at the IDMA in 2011, an award Smursh won again this year for Penguin Books India.

With Klip, Harsh and Maneesh aim to take their experience and understanding of the digital sphere to help connect people with products and create a thriving name in the consumer Internet space in India.

ends