Trell raises $1.25 mn in funds from Beenext, WEH Ventures and others

Experience discovery platform Trell has raised $1.25 million in a funding round led Singapore-based Beenext and Mumbai-headquartered WEH Ventures. Sprout Venture Partners, Google India MD Rajan Anandan among others participated in the round.

The funds will be used to expand and strengthen the team in areas including product, technology and data science.

“There is a rising trend of exploring local and travel experiences among the 230 million urban millennials in India. The cult is such that they describe themselves as travellers/explorers/foodies over social media. Also, these users have short attention spans and prefer visuals over text; the exponential increase in engagement in short videos; 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,” said Prashant Sachan, co-founder of Trell.

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 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, local discoveries."

Deepak Gupta of WEH Ventures said, “We believe that visual content is the new normal and can be used to reimagine the travel and experiences segment. Trell has made a great start with inspiring authentic content on its platform and we believe will take this a long way in changing user journeys in this segment.”

Trell was launched in 2017, as a video-first experience discovery platform for millenials to share travel and local content. It currently has around 230 million users including non-English speaking audience which is growing at 18% CAGR. It aims to capture 10% of this untapped market by the end of 2019.

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