Profile / Founders & Operators
He turned a hunt for hidden Ganesh Chaturthi pandals into a 50-million-user app, then watched India's social-commerce dream test every assumption he had made.
The idea did not arrive in a boardroom. It arrived during Ganesh Chaturthi, when Pulkit Agrawal went looking for the good pandals in Mumbai and realized he had no way to find them. The best ones lived in the heads of people who grew up on those streets. A local friend walked him to spots no guidebook listed. He kept thinking about the gap: the knowledge existed, it was just trapped inside people who had no interest in writing a blog about it.
That small frustration became a company. In 2016, Agrawal and three classmates from IIT Bombay - Arun Lodhi, Bimal Kartheek Rebba and Prashant Sachan - started testing whether anyone else felt the same itch. They did not build an app first. They built an Instagram page, @trellingmumbai, and started posting the hidden corners of the city. In under four months it crossed 40,000 followers. The demand was not a hunch anymore. It was a number.
"Empower every Indian to make better lifestyle choices."
The app that followed in 2017 was called Trell, a nod to the word "trail." The premise was simple to say and hard to do: let ordinary people post short lifestyle videos - food, travel, beauty, temples, markets - and let other people follow those trails to decide where to go and what to buy. The catch, and the thing that made Trell interesting, was who it was built for. Not the English-fluent metro crowd already saturated with apps. It was built for the person in Lucknow or Jaipur who was arriving on the internet for the first time, on a cheap phone, more comfortable watching than reading.
Most apps open by asking what you are interested in. Trell opened by asking something more basic: what language do you speak? Then it dropped you into a community that sounded like home. Agrawal talked about this constantly, because to him it was the whole game.
"Nine out of ten users coming on the internet today are not very proficient in English. Local languages are the key to convincing the next half-billion users."
Trell eventually carried lifestyle content across eight Indian languages - Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali and more. Roughly six in ten users came from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, the places most consumer startups treated as an afterthought. The bet was that relatability, not polish, was the thing that would convert a hesitant new user into a daily one. A woman in a smaller town would take a skincare tip more seriously from someone who sounded like her neighbor than from a glossy ad in a language she half-understood.
Agrawal did not come to this cold. At IIT Bombay he studied electrical engineering on the integrated B.Tech and M.Tech track, ran the Finance Club as its founding manager, and spent time around Mood Indigo, the campus festival. His first startup was not lifestyle video at all. It was Personify, a home-automation venture that reached the finals of the Eureka! contest and pulled in angel funding. It taught him how to build something from nothing before Trell asked him to do it at national scale.
The founding team split the load the way strong technical teams do. Lodhi took the technology. Rebba, who had done consulting and carried an MBA, took operations. Agrawal took the wheel as chief executive and the public voice of the company, the one explaining to investors and reporters why regional India was the opportunity everyone else was underpricing.
By 2020, Trell had a thesis with a name that every Indian consumer startup was chanting: content, community, commerce. Get people watching. Turn watchers into a community that trusts each other. Then let that trust carry purchases - a face cream, a phone case, a kurta - through the same feed. Trell Shop launched, brands came aboard by the hundreds, and a striking share of orders came from exactly the small-town buyers the app had been built to reach.
The pitch was good enough to draw serious money. The Series A was led by Sequoia Capital India, with KTB Network and Samsung Ventures in the mix. Then, in July 2021, came the headline round: $45 million, led by Mirae Asset and H&M's CO:LAB fund, with Samsung Ventures back for more. On paper, Trell had done the improbable thing - built a homegrown answer to short-video social commerce for the half of India that global apps had barely noticed.
Distribution turned out to be cheap. Trust turned out to be expensive.
That is the sentence the Trell story keeps coming back to. Getting tens of millions of people to watch was the part that scaled. Getting them to pull out a wallet and pay a stranger, on the strength of a video, was a different mountain - one that ate marketing budget and did not always return durable revenue. The engagement was real. The conversion into a self-sustaining business was the hard, unglamorous middle that a lot of consumer companies underestimate.
In 2022, the arc bent. A board-ordered probe into alleged financial irregularities froze new fundraising at the worst possible moment. What followed was the part no founder puts in a keynote: deep layoffs, a retreat from the e-commerce ambitions, and by the next year a return to the leaner lifestyle-video format the company had started with. Revenue fell hard. Investors who had marked Trell as a bet on Bharat marked it back down.
It would be easy to file that under failure and move on. It is more useful to sit with it. Trell got the demand read right - regional-language video for small-town India was, and is, a genuine wave. What it underestimated was how much capital, patience and governance discipline it takes to convert a wave of attention into a company that lasts. That gap between a correct insight and a durable business is where most ambitious consumer startups actually live or die.
Strip away the funding headlines and the harder chapters, and a consistent instinct remains in how Agrawal talks about the work. Start with a real gap you personally felt. Test it before you build it. Design for the person the internet forgot, not the one it already serves. Ask people their language before you ask them anything else.
"I believe in thinking customer-first and giving ownership to individuals."
He framed the ambition plainly - to become a global leader in visual blogging and lifestyle commerce, and to let creators turn a passion into a living. Trell reached for that at a scale few Indian consumer apps managed, and it did so by pointing at the people most companies were too busy to serve. The market it opened up did not disappear when the company stumbled. If anything, the wave of regional-language video only got bigger. The next founders who ride it will be standing, in part, on what Trell learned the expensive way.
That is the useful version of this story. Not a clean triumph, not a cautionary tale to wave away, but a real one: a first startup no one remembers, a second one that touched fifty million people, and a founder who kept insisting that the future of Indian consumer internet would be spoken in Hindi, Marathi and Tamil - and watched, not read.