Trell, an experience discovery platform leveraged the LetsVenture platform to raise funds. Powered by user-generated original short videos, Trell raised a seed round of $1.25 Mn co-led by BEENEXT and WEH Ventures. Sprout Venture Partners, Rajan Anandan (MD, Google India & SEA) & Anupam Mittal (Founder, Shaadi.com) & other HNIs also participated through LetsVenture in the round.The funds will be used to expand and strengthen the team in the areas of product, technology and data science. Also, the fund will be leveraged for further growth and partnerships.Trell is reimagining experience discovery for millennials through visual and immersive user-generated content. It has already crossed half a million downloads and has over 200K monthly actives. It was started by a team of IIT Bombay alumni Pulkit Agrawal, Prashant Sachan, Arun Lodhi& NITIE alumnus Bimal Kartheek Rebba (Ex- Qualcomm, Microsoft, Samsung, ITC). After more than 9 iterations to the initial MVP and consistent feedbacks from community, Trell was launched in August 2017 on Android, iOS and Web, and within 8 months it has got more than 2 million user-generated content uploads with experiences ranging from exploring local street food stalls to european backpacking trips. The content on Trell is all visual, geo-tagged and has strong storytelling element, which makes it contextual and immersive, and this differentiates it from all other competitors. It was also the only Indian startup to win worldwide Mobile UX Award ’17. Other winners were silicon valley giants including Crunchbase, Eventbrite and Wattpad. Trell also aims at becoming the enabler for various businesses by helping users take decisions intuitively though user generated vlogs & trust.
Our vision is to help people share and discover experiences effortlessly and inspire them to go out and do those things in the real world. We are thrilled to partner with experienced & prominent names in the industry who understood the core of the problem we are solving. Our focus is on democratizing travel and local knowledge. For this, we are building an active content creator community on the platform. - Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder - TrellTrell has solved the hardest problem in the travel & local space, which is the content supply problem. Users are intrinsically creating high quality content on the platform, Trell’s authoring tool serves as a modern-age easy-to-use replacement of Wordpress Blog and Youtube Vlog for sharing stories of travel & local experiences. We will democratize the act of Travel, Food and Lifestyle vlogging as a phenomenon as we grow further. Trell will potentially serve as a profession to the creator community, similar to how Youtube has built over the period of time. - Prashant Sachan, Co-founder - Trell
The startup also saw participation from existing angels Aprameya Radhakrishna (CEO, Vokal & Founder, TaxiForSure), Nirav Choksi (CEO, Credable), Shanti Mohan (CEO, LetsVenture), Nitin Gupta (CEO, Ola Money and Ex -CEO and Founder, PayU India) and Amit Lakhotia (VP - Business, Tokopedia); from whom they raised $250K last year.
We’re 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. 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. - Teruhide Sato, Founder and Managing Partner, BEENEXTTrell as a venture is a perfect example of a strong founding team, and a great product idea. Trell's mobile app sits at the intersection of experience sharing and rising trend of video adoption as content. We believe this could quickly become a great example of a global product developed from India. This will drive higher UGC due to the ease of content creating and sharing on the platform. - Shanti Mohan, Co-Founder of LetsVenture and an investor in Trell
About Trell:Launched in August 2017, Trell is Video-First experience discovery platform for outgoing millennials to share travel and local content. The content on Trell is original and is being generated by the users intrinsically, driven through its strong & growing community - and has potential to scale fast globally. Trell is accessible on Android, iOS, and WebThe content is all visual, geo-tagged and has strong storytelling element. This makes it contextual and immersive, and this differentiates it from all other competitors. It will offer an intuitive way for its users to discover real life experiences around them.Before the launch, the founders had initiated a city-wise Instagram community for Trell to engage with their consumers closely, understand their behaviors, content consumption patterns, and usage-needs. The Instagram handle was an instant success and it presently garners more than 10Mn monthly views with a 400K+ following. Trell with its innovative format and peer to peer discovery approach has also been appreciated worldwide and selected in StartupBootcamp'16 - (Europe's Largest Business Accelerator) as “Top 10 promising startups worldwide”, Nasscom's 10K Program and FBStart. Addressable user-base in India around experience discovery is currently at ~200M users. This includes non-English speaking audience which is growing at 18% CAGR. Trell aims to capture 10% of this untapped market by the end of 2019.About LetsVentureFounded in 2013, LetsVenture is India’s premier platform for Angels, Family Offices, and Foreign Funds to invest in Startup & VC Funds. LetsVenture works with startups and investors on discovery, syndicat, on and closure of funding rounds. This involves managing due diligence and paperwork closure. There are 18000+ startups and 3000+ investors on the platform. In the last 4 years, their investor members have invested in 163 companies raising $66.8 Mn. LetsVenture is backed by India’s most prominent investors like Accel and IDG Ventures. Also, Nandan Nilekani (Founder, $30B Infosys), Rishad Premji ($35B Wipro), Ratan Tata (Chairman Emeritus of $100B Tata Group), Mohandas Pai and Karan Thakral (Singapore) back LetsVenture.
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