BEENEXT And WEH Lead $1.25 Mn Funding In Experience Discovery Platform Trell

Bengaluru-based video-first experience discovery platform Trell has raised $1.25 Mn in a Seed round of funding co-led by BEENEXT and WEH Ventures.

Trell was founded in August 2017 by a team of IIT Bombay alumni Pulkit Agrawal, Prashant Sachan, Arun Lodhi & NITIE alumnus Bimal Kartheek Rebba, who have previously worked with Qualcomm, Microsoft, Samsung and ITC.

It is a blogging platform that enables people to create visual collections of their travel and local experiences and share it as a classic slideshow video or copyrighted-images on other platforms.

The funding round, conducted through LetsVenture platform, also witnessed participation from Sprout Venture Partners, Google India MD Rajan Anandan, and Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal, and other HNIs.

Apart from this, the startup saw participation from existing angels — Aprameya Radhakrishna, Nirav Choksi, Shanti Mohan, Nitin Gupta, and Amit Lakhotia — among others. Trell had earlier raised $250K from these investors last year.

Teruhide Sato, founder and managing partner, BEENEXT, said, “We’re very confident about team Trell’s understanding of what we see as a massive market opportunity. Moreover, we feel 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 & local discoveries.”

The startup will be using the raised funds to expand and strengthen the team in the areas of product, technology, and data science.

What Does Trell Do?

Trell defies categorisation as a ‘travel’ or ‘local experiences’ sharing platform as its users share stories of experiences ranging from a cafe in their neighbourhood or a weekend getaway to a planned trip to a far-off destination.

Users use Trell to discover experiences through other people with similar interests, preferences, and personality type. This further leads to a high-frequency usage of the platform and currently, their DAU/MAU is around 30% and WAU/MAU is around 58%.

The content on Trell is all visual, geo-tagged, and has a strong storytelling element, which makes it contextual and immersive, and helps in differentiating from all other competitors.

The startup claims to have crossed half a million downloads and has over 200,000 monthly actives, within eight months of its product launch. It is accessible on Android, iOS, and Web.

Prashant Sachan, co-founder, Trell, said, “Trell Users are intrinsically creating high-quality content on the platform using its authoring tool which serves as an easy-to-use replacement for WordPress/vlogs on Youtube for sharing local and travel stories. Currently, users are creating over 10K original posts every day, and it is growing 1.5X Month-on-month since September ’17.”

In the same sector, Bengaluru-based video sharing startup Clip App had raised $6 Mn in its Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India.

Trell competes with other startups such as Foursquare, Tripoto, Kiwi.com, Airbnb, among others.