Lifestyle Social Commerce Platform Trell Raises $45 Mn In Series B Funding

Bengaluru-based lifestyle social commerce platform Trell has raised $45 Mn in a Series B round of funding led by financial group Mirae Asset, H&M Group and co-led by LB Investments. Existing investors such as KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, and Fosun RZ Capital have also participated in this round.

The startup will infuse the freshly raised capital to further develop its AI and ML technologies across regional languages as well as strengthen the team. The app is currently available in six regional languages. Having raised $11.5 Mn in Series A funding last year, the company has raised over $62 Mn so far. With latest funding, Trell is also looking to expand its commerce operations by entering into the apparel, home care, mom and baby-care categories in the months to come.

Founded in 2016 by Arun Lodhi, Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Prashant Sachan and Pulkit Agrawal, Trell has been focusing on enabling people to create visual collections of their lifestyle experiences. It allows users to share their short videos to connect with like-minded individuals, discover lifestyle trends and share content around their interests and passions across categories such as beauty, fashion, wellness, health, food, TV reviews, travel, and gadgets.

Nanna Anderson, head of H&M CO: LAB, H&M Group’s Investment arm, said, “Social commerce is a very interesting and growing space within the retail industry in India and globally. Trell has shown impressive growth over the years and we believe that it has the potential to become a global leader in this space.”

Social commerce is worth $1.5 to $2 Bn GMV market today and is likely to hit $60 Bn to $70 billion in 2030. Accelerated by the pandemic, the ecosystem is estimated to grab 5% of the Indian ecommerce market at a CAGR of 65% between 2020 to 2025. Trell has currently over 100 Mn downloads and over 50 Mn monthly active users on its app. The company also claims to be garnering over 20 Bn monthly views from across 2000 cities in India.

In August 2020, Trell also launched its social commerce section on the app, enabling users to watch personalised product recommendations across beauty, personal care and wellness categories that they can buy from within the app.  Trell onboarded over 500 personal care and beauty brands in the last few months, with the most recent addition of Maybelline, L’Oréal and Garnier.