iVenture Sourcing Engine: Building Deal Flow Infrastructure at ISB's AIC

Manas joined iVenture, ISB's incubator under the Atal Incubation Center, as a student associate on the venture side across roughly seven months, running alongside his PGP program at roughly 15 to 20 hours a week during cohort selection periods.

When he arrived, deal flow was largely inbound and relationship-driven, which meant cohorts skewed toward whoever knew someone at ISB. He built the sourcing engine from near-scratch. He pulled from Traction, accelerator lists, alumni networks, D2C marketplaces, category-specific trade bodies, and founder referrals, working through roughly a thousand companies over the period.

He also built the screening rubric: stage, category, headroom, founder-market fit, team background, unit economics where they existed, and whether iVenture could actually be useful to the company, which he considered an underweighted filter. That process shortlisted hundreds of companies for advisory consideration. The taxonomy decisions and database hygiene were his to own.

On the advisory side, he went deep with a handful of companies where he had domain fit. On Baby Organo, an Ayurveda baby care brand, he ran cohort analysis on their transactional data, which had not been done before, and found that repeat concentration sat in two SKUs and one use case. He argued for narrowing the wedge before expanding.

On PadCare, a deep tech company in sanitary waste circularity, his contribution was investor storytelling and B2B GTM framing: helping them articulate the buyer, the procurement cycle, and the unit economics in language that institutional buyers and investors would both accept.

Several companies from the cohort he worked with raised pre-series A funding, including Baby Organo and PadCare.