FROM CLASSROOM TO COMPANY: HOW PRIYA MEHTA BUILT NOURISHNET INSIDE ADYPU.

The idea didn't come in a lecture. It came at 2 a.m. in a farmers' market in Pune, watching an elderly vendor throw away three crates of tomatoes because no buyer had shown up. I was a third-year student in the Food Technology programme, and something clicked — not just emotionally, but analytically.

I'd spent months studying post-harvest losses in my coursework. But this was the first time I saw it not as a statistic but as a person's livelihood disappearing into a dumpster. I pulled out my phone and started mapping the problem from the vendor's side. By morning, I had the bones of what would become NourishNet.

Finding the incubator

A professor pointed me toward the ADYPU Incubator. I remember being nervous to walk in — expecting corporate polish and people who'd dismiss a student idea. What I found instead was a lab that smelled like whiteboard markers and ambition, and a programme manager who listened to my 2 a.m. story for forty minutes without checking his phone once.

Over the next six months inside the incubator, we validated the supply chain model across twelve mandis in Maharashtra. We discovered that the real bottleneck wasn't logistics — it was trust between aggregators and last-mile buyers. So we pivoted from a logistics app to a reputation-and-credit layer built on top of existing supply chains.

What the incubator gave me

The mentors didn't tell me what to build. They asked better questions than I could ask myself. The lab access meant we could prototype cold-chain tracking without a hardware budget. And perhaps most importantly, the community of fellow founders — working on everything from ed-tech to waste management — kept me honest about my assumptions.

NourishNet is now live in three districts, working with over 200 smallholder farmers. We're preparing for our seed round. But the company started in a classroom, grew in an incubator, and found its spine in that 2 a.m. moment when data became human.