Trell, a Bengaluru-based lifestyle-community-commerce platform, announced a $11.4 million Series A round led by KTB Network.
Other investors that participated in the current financing round include Samsung Ventures, Ankur Nagpal, CEO of Teachable, Gokul Rajaram (Board Member, Pinterest, Square, DoorDash) and Vineet Buch (Ex-Head of Google Play Store Development) along with existing investors Sequoia’s Surge, Fosun RZ Capital, and WEH Ventures.
Trell will utilise the current financing to further expand and grow the fostering community, to enhance the platform’s personalisation and recommendation engine with advanced machine learning Algorithms and AI, and add new features that will excite the users experience. Also, Trell has plans to hire an energetic and creative team that empathises with their audiences.
Founded in 2017 by IIT Bombay alumni Arun Lodhi, Prashant Sachan, Pulkit Agrawal and NITIE alumnus Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Trell is a mobile application, where users come together to share 3-minute vertical videos around their interests and passions in the categories like Beauty, Recipes, Fashion, Personal Care, Technology & Gadgets, Movies & TV Reviews, and many more and connect with like-minded individuals in their own native languages.
Currently, Trell has over 20 categories available in 8 Indian languages. It monetises through social commerce where the interest-based/passion-based community of content creators (KOL’s) enable users to make well informed and suitable purchase decisions for better lifestyle choices.
“Trell has shown incredible growth over the last few months and we believe it’s only the beginning of what will come in the future. We were especially impressed by how the team dealt with an unexpected user growth during the covid-period. It’ll soon be a most prominent lifestyle social discovery platform in India and we’re happy to ride on a rocketship”, said Hyesung Kim, KTB Network
Since the Chinese App ban, Trell has witnessed 500% growth with a total of 15 million+ creators on its platform receiving more than 5Bn monthly views and has been rapidly growing since then.
Pulkit Agrawal, Co-Founder, Trell said, “With this investment, we look forward to building towards our vision of empowering millions of Indians to have better lifestyle choices.”
Prashant Sachan, Co-Founder, Trell said, “We are glad to see the rapid growth and consumer love at Trell. Even today, over 500Mn Indian Language internet users are struggling with lifestyle inspiration and purchase decisions. With more regional key-opinion-leaders (KOLs) coming on Trell, our aim is to become the most relatable lifestyle community commerce platform for our users.”
Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Co-Founder, Trell, said, “We take a lot of effort into grooming our creators in the ‘Trell Creators Program’ into subject matter experts, who we call key opinion leaders. With these funds, we will be investing in grooming 100,000 new opinion leaders across languages for India and provide 100+ million Indians the access to purpose-driven content at their fingertips in the coming years. ”
Arun Lodhi, Co-Founder, Trell, said, “At Trell, we are leveraging cutting edge advancements in machine learning and neural networks for building a personalized experience. We are also utilizing advanced tech in helping the content creators on our platform to further hone their craft. By analyzing data around their various videos, we provide personalized recommendations to KOLs, in addition to other tips and tricks that help them improve their craft, especially storytelling.”
Trell has been backed by angel investors such as Rajan Anandan, Aprameya Radhakrishna, (Co-founder of Vocal and TaxiForSure), Ramakant Sharma (Co-founder, LivSpace), Nitin Gupta (Co-founder, PayUMoney), Anupam Mittal (Founder, Shaadi.com), Amit Lakhotia (Founder, Park+, ex-Tokopedia, Paytm), Shanti Mohan (CEO, LetsVenture). Trell was also a part of the second cohort of Surge, Sequoia Capital India’s rapid-scale up program.
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