Fastest growing Lifestyle Community Commerce platform Trell raises USD 11. 4 Mn Series A from KTB Network and Samsung Ventures among others.

India’s largest lifestyle-community-commerce platform, Trell, announced an $11.4 million Series A round led by KTB Network. 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. Currently, they have over 20 categories available in 8 Indian languages. Trell 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 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

With over 75 Million 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 million+ creators on its platform receiving more than 5Bn monthly views and has been rapidly growing since then. 

Pulkit Agrawal, Co-Founder, Trell said, “We are thrilled to onboard KTB Network and Samsung Ventures as partners in the journey and 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.” 

The new round of investment will be used to further expand and grow the fostering community, to enhance the platform’s personalization and recommendation engine with advanced machine learning algorithms and AI, and add new features that will excite the users experience. To reinforce the same, Trell is in the process of hiring an energetic and creative team that empathises with their audiences.

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 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 counts prominent names like 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) in its existing list of angel investors. Trell was also a part of the second cohort of Surge, Sequoia Capital India’s rapid-scale up program. With this funding, the total funding raised by Trell comes to $16.95 million.