From the Press Release:
VentureNursery, India’s first angel-backed start-up accelerator has announced a seed investment by its angel investors in Oravel Stays, based in Gurgaon.
Oravel [www.oravel.com] is focused on the short and midterm rentals space and is an aggregator of Bed and Breakfast, Private Rooms and Serviced Apartments which enables travellers to book clean, comfortable, affordable spaces. Oravel, which is primarily focussed on NCR region at present, is getting very good traction from SME’s, International, MICE travellers and medical tourists. The company’s website has over 4000 properties listed across metros and others parts of India. 20% of its properties are theme based and offer a unique stay experience to the guests.
Oravel was founded in 2011 by 18 year old Ritesh Agarwal, ¬who comes from a family business background of Infrastructure. The company joined VentureNursery’s acceleration program in July, 2012 and has graduated with a Platinum grade.
According to Mr Ritesh Agarwal, “The bed and breakfast segment is an exciting opportunity in Indian e-commerce. Given the increasing size of this segment, our understanding of this space in terms of managing customer expectations and property owners will be the key to expand.”
Mr Manish Sinha, owner of one of India’s most loved boutique bed and breakfast properties, Gurgaon based Cinnamon Stays, has joined Oravel as a co-founder. Manish brings over 16 years of experience of brand building across some of the biggest advertising groups and deep operations experience of bed and breakfast space.
Ravi Kiran, Co-founder, VentureNursery said “In Ritesh, our Charter Angels found exceptional passion, high energy and ability to overcome tough situations. Manish adds maturity of thinking, professional experience and depth of domain knowledge having personally built and run one of the best known bread and breakfast brands in NCR and served many demanding guests from within India and overseas successfully.”
Shravan Shroff, Co-founder, VentureNursery added, “The B&B space is a large and underserved segment in India and all indicators appear strong. Oravel has been showing good traction and has made excellent progress during the acceleration program. We hope the mentoring by our advisors and this round of seed funding by our angels will help Oravel pick up momentum is on its way to build a great business”
Oravel has so far been funded by promoter capital. This round of funds will be utilized for team, technology and network expansion.
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 program, successfully graduating start-ups are evaluated for investment by a dozen strong group of committed and seasoned angel investors. In addition to the BootCamp method, Venture Nursery also accepts start-ups for acceleration through its PARALLELTRACK process.
Although designed to be sector agnostic in the long run, at present, VentureNursery 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 a group of 20 Advisors-in-Residence and Executives-in-Residence to complete the support to the start-ups.