Bengaluru-based lifestyle-community-commerce platform Trell has raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Fozun RZ Capital and KTB Network.

Existing investors Beenext, WEH Ventures and Sprout Ventures also participated in the round, the company said in a statement.

Launched in August 2017 by IIT Bombay alumni Arun Lodhi, Prashant Sachan and Pulkit Agrawal and NITIE alumnus Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Trell is a mobile application that enables Indian users to share and discover personalised recommendations and product reviews across lifestyle interests. These include skincare and personal grooming, fashion, cooking, wellness, movie and web-show reviews, home decor and travel.

The platform has created an ecosystem of regional influencers or ‘key opinion leaders’ (KOLs) who share localised content in five Indian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, English, and Hindi).

“Today, over 400 million Indian language internet users struggle with lifestyle aspirations. The dearth of meaningful content in their own languages and lack of trustworthy sources of information on the internet are the two prime reasons for this,” Pulkit Agrawal, Co-Founder, Trell said.

“We actively engage with our KOLs through the ‘Trell Creators’ Academy’ programme, wherein 25,000 creators are currently being educated every day to create valuable content, grow their reach, become influencers and eventually solve for the scarcity of regional content,” he added.

With over 15 million downloads and 5 million monthly active users on its app, Trell has grown 20 times in the last 12 months. In January 2020 alone, its community of 500,000 content creators published 1.2 million content pieces on Trell, which garnered more than 300 million views.

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