Experience discovery app Trell raises US$1.25 million in seed funding

Local experience discovery platform Trell has raised US$1.25 million in seed funding from multiple investors. The Bengaluru-based startup, which generates content via short videos and images, will use the funds to scale and strengthen its product, technology and data science capabilities.

The latest seed round was co-led by BeeNext and WEH Ventures. Sprout Venture Partners and individual investors, such as Rajan Anandan, managing director of Google India, and Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com, also participated in the round through LetsVenture platform.

Earlier in March 2017, Trell had raised US$250,000 from existing investors including Aprameya Radhakrishna, founder of TaxiForSure; Nirav Choksi, chief executive of supply chain finance tech firm CredAble; Shanti Mohan, CEO of deals platform LetsVenture; Nitin Gupta, CEO of Ola Money and founder of payments firm PayU India; and Amit Lakhotia, former vice president of business at Indonesian e-commerce firm Tokopedia, among others.

Trell was launched in August 2017 as a platform designed for millennials to share their experiences of places and food, as well as discover those of others through user-generated short-form video content.

Prashant Sachan, Trell’s co-founder, said: “There is a rising trend of exploring local and travel experiences among the 230 million urban millennials in India. 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.”

Co-founder Pulkit Agarwal added: “The content is all visual, geo-tagged and has a strong storytelling element, which makes it contextual and immersive, and this differentiates it from other competitors. It will offer an intuitive way for its users to discover real-life experiences around them.”

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