India’s largest and the fastest growing lifestyle community commerce platform, Trell has announced a $11.4 Mn Series A round led by KTB Network and Samsung Ventures.
Ankur Nagpal, CEO of Teachable, Gokul Rajaram (Board Member, Pinterest, Square, DoorDash) and Vineet Buch (Ex-Head of Google Play Store Development) also participated via Firebolt Ventures in the round along with existing investors Sequoia’s Surge, Fosun RZ Capital, and WEH Ventures.
Launched in August 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.
This is the second round of funding for the company in the past eight months. In December last year, the company had raised $4 Mn from Sequoia and Fosun at a market cap of $19 Mn.
“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 pandemic. It’ll soon be a most prominent lifestyle social discovery platform in India and we’re happy to ride on a rocket ship”, said Hyesung Kim, KTB Network.
With over 75 Mn downloads and 25 Million monthly active users on its app, Trell has grown 27X in the last 12 months and has emerged as one of the biggest lifestyle social platforms in India. Since the Chinese App ban, Trell has witnessed 500% growth with a total of 15 Mn+ creators on its platform receiving more than 5Bn monthly views and has been rapidly growing since then.
Currently, they have over 20 categories available in 8 Indian languages. Trell monetizes 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.