Visual blogging platform Trell raises $1.25 M in seed funding from multiple investors

Experience discovery platform Trell announced that it has raised $1.25 million in seed funding from multiple investors. The Bengaluru-based platform, which generates content via short videos and images, will reportedly use the funds to scale and strengthen its product, technology, and data science capabilities.

The seed round of $1.25 million was co-led by BEENEXT and WEH Ventures. Sprout Venture Partners, Rajan Anandan, MD of Google India, Anupam Mittal, Founder of Shaadi.com, and other HNIs also participated in the round through LetsVenture platform.

Trell’s existing angels -Aprameya Radhakrishna (Founder of TaxiForSure), Nirav Choksi (CEO, Credable), Shanti Mohan (CEO, LetsVenture), Nitin Gupta (CEO, Ola Money and Founder, PayU India), Amit Lakhotia (VP - Business, Tokopedia) and others, from whom they had raised $250,000 in March 2017, were also a part of the seed funding round.

According to a statement released by Tell, the funds will be used to expand and strengthen the team in the areas of product, technology and data science.

“We are very confident about team Trell’s understanding of what we see as a massive market opportunity. Moreover, we feel it’s the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds, incredible user growth strategies and a highly data-driven approach. I believe Trell will offer a new way for travel and local discoveries,“ added Teruhide Sato, Founder and Managing Partner – BEENEXT.

Trell claims that it has already crossed half a million downloads and has over 200,000 monthly actives, in eight months of its product launch. It is accessible on Android, iOS and Web.

Launched in August 2017, Trell is a visual blogging platform especially designed for millennials to share their unique experiences of places and palates as well as discover those of others through user-generated short-form video content. The platform was started by IIT alumni Pulkit Agarwal, Prashant Sachan, Arun Lodhi, and NITIE alumnus Bimal Kartheek Rebba.

Prashant Sachan, Trell’s co-founder, said, “There is a rising trend of exploring local and travel experiences among the 230 million urban millennials in India. Also, these users have short attention spans and prefer visuals over text; the exponential increase in engagement in short videos and video-first platforms indicate the same, be it for education, news or entertainment. Their need to discover new experiences around them has to be served differently, as the existing platforms are using conventional and dated ways to do so,”

The content on Trell is original and is being generated by the users intrinsically, driven through its strong and growing community - and has potential to scale fast globally.

“The content is all visual, geo-tagged and has a strong storytelling element, which makes it contextual and immersive, and this differentiates it from other competitors. It will offer an intuitive way for its users to discover real-life experiences around them,” added co-founder Pulkit Agarwal.

Trell has earlier won California-based Mobile UX Award 2017, was also part of StartupBootCamp Barcelona '17, FBStart, and Nasscom 10K Startups.