Bangalore: With an idea of germinating gourmet mushrooms out of leftover coffee grounds, the two recent graduates of the University of California at Berkeley, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, launched a company, which was also recently nominated for Business Week's America's Best Young Entrepreneurs award. Also, the 22-year-old Arora told that his start-up, BTTR Ventures, was tied for second place and won $10,000 at BBC World's World Challenge competition several weeks ago. More than 127,000 people worldwide voted online for their favorite environmentally-friendly start-ups. The two founders attended the awards ceremony in The Hague, Netherlands. Health food superstore Whole Foods not only sells the mushrooms, but also a home-mushroom kit created by Arora and Velez. The fungi are grown in stacked racks in a warehouse in Emeryville, California. BTTR Ventures is now turning a profit, Arora said. The idea for the company evolved when the two budding mycologists met while taking a business ethics course in December 2008 at U.C.-Berkeley. A lecturer told the class about women in Colombia and Africa who fight malnutrition with used coffee. The light bulb went on and Velez and Arora decided to turn the former's fraternity kitchen in "into a science lab," growing mushrooms, Arora told "We spent the last semester knee deep in coffee and experimenting to see if our idea would work," Arora told one reporter. U.C.-Berkeley's ecology department helped out and they received a $5,000 grant from the social innovation department. Neither founders had any science background, but Arora did have some experience working at the University of Ghana in the summer of 2007, helping design a profitable recycling program for the 30,000-person campus. The two received feedback on their product from friends, restaurants and food producers. They got some funny looks on the streets of Berkeley, a result not easily accomplished, when they could be observed "carrying buckets of mushrooms around," Arora said. Some critics advised them that coffee grounds were too acidic and dense to grow mushrooms efficiently. Hover, the validation came, when a chef at Berkeley's well-known Chez Panisse restaurant tried and liked the mushrooms. Later testimonials came from KCBS radio food and wine critic Narsai David and actor Ed Begley. Arora had been considering a consulting career. Velez was thinking in terms of investment banking. Both plans have now been shelved so that BTTR Ventures could percolate. They did manage to attend enough classes to graduate in June 2009. Whole Foods' inspectors looked over the warehouse operations in Emeryville and Peet's Coffee and Tea in the Bay Area agreed to supply coffee grounds. It takes about 3,000 pounds of coffee leavings a week to make 300 pounds of mushrooms, Arora said. The home-garden kit is now sold at about a half dozen farmers' markets. BTTR Ventures has three full-time employees, and the warehouse facility is nearing capacity. Fresh food and local produce are the key concepts for Arora and he hopes the company can expand to add more social-minded projects and business ventures.