Company Profile · Social Video Commerce · India
Trell
A three-minute video, eight languages, and a bet that a lifestyle feed could double as a shopping cart.
A three-minute video, eight languages, and a bet that a lifestyle feed could double as a shopping cart.
There is a certain kind of company that is easy to describe and hard to run, and Trell was one of them. Founded in 2016 by four friends from IIT-Bombay - Pulkit Agrawal, Prashant Sachan, Arun Lodhi and Bimal Kartheek Rebba - it began as a lifestyle app where people posted roughly three-minute vertical videos about the things they did: where they traveled, what they ate, which serum they liked. The pitch was tidy. India was coming online by the hundreds of millions, most of the newcomers did not live in Mumbai or Delhi, and nobody was making content for them in their own language. Trell would.
And for a while, the tidy pitch produced tidy numbers. Trell's community skewed toward Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities - Lucknow, Jaipur, the places that rarely make it into a pitch deck's hero slide - and it grew content across eight regional languages, from Hindi and Marathi to Tamil and Bengali. At its peak the company reported around 50 million monthly active users. This is the part where you are supposed to be impressed, and it is genuinely a lot of people. It is also worth remembering that a monthly active user is a person who opened an app, not a person who bought anything. The distance between those two facts is where Trell would eventually live and die.
Because in August 2020, Trell did the thing that content companies with no revenue tend to do: it added a Shop. The in-app Trell Shop turned the feed into a marketplace for beauty, personal care and wellness products, the theory being that a creator you trust recommending a face wash is worth more than a banner ad. Call it social commerce, call it video-first shopping, call it India's answer to both TikTok and QVC at the same time. The company onboarded 500-plus brands, and by 2021 it said roughly 70% of purchases came from Tier-2 and Tier-3 buyers - exactly the audience it had built for.
Investors liked the story. Trell raised about $66 million across its life: a $250K angel round in 2017, $1.3M from BEENEXT and WEH Ventures in 2018, then a run of larger checks as the commerce pivot took hold - Sequoia Capital India (later Peak XV), KTB Network and Samsung Ventures. The headline round came in July 2021: a $45 million Series B led by Mirae Asset, with the fashion retailer H&M and Samsung's venture arm both writing checks. When a clothing giant and an electronics giant both invest in your app, it is fair to feel like you have found something.
| Round | Amount | Date | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angel | $250K | Mar 2017 | Angel investors |
| Seed | $1.3M | Jul 2018 | BEENEXT, WEH Ventures |
| Pre-Series A | $4M | Mar 2020 | Sequoia Capital India |
| Series A | $11.5M | 2020 | KTB Network, Samsung Ventures |
| Series B | $45M | Jul 2021 | Mirae Asset, H&M, Samsung Ventures |
Then things compressed, fast. In March 2022, allegations of financial irregularities surfaced, and Trell's board ordered a probe into its co-founders. That is roughly the worst possible timing for a startup, because a governance question freezes the one thing a cash-burning company cannot live without: the next fundraise. With the round stalled, the runway shortened, and the company let go of about 300 people - close to 75% of its workforce. In April 2022 it exited its stake in AppsForBharat amid the crunch.
The financials followed the story down. Trell's FY22 revenue was around Rs 80.6 crore; in FY23 it fell to roughly Rs 4.77 crore - a drop of about 94% - with a reported Rs 59 crore loss. By early 2023 the company had dropped e-commerce entirely and rebranded back into a plain lifestyle short-video app, which is a bit like a restaurant deciding it would rather be a room where people look at food. Peak XV, the fund formerly known as Sequoia India, was later reported to have exited its Trell investment at roughly a 78% loss.
None of this makes Trell a morality tale. It is closer to a data point, and a useful one. The company was early - it was making regional-language short video before Instagram Reels launched in India - and being early is both a real advantage and a real tax. You get to define a category, and you get to pay for every lesson the market has not learned yet. Trell's lesson was that flipping an engaged audience into paying buyers is a change of business, not a change of button. Media companies and commerce companies pull in different directions, and doing both at full speed is expensive.
What is worth keeping is the original insight, which was correct: there really is an enormous audience in non-metro India, it really does want content in its own language, and video really can drive purchases. Trell saw that clearly. The harder truth it ran into is that distribution is cheap and trust is expensive - and trust is the one thing you cannot raise in a funding round.
Browse three-minute vertical videos on travel, food, beauty and fashion, made by people in your own language and city.
Post your own experiences and build a following as a creator - Trell's community leaned heavily on everyday users, not just influencers.
Purchase beauty, personal care and wellness products discovered through creator videos, without leaving the app.
For 500+ D2C and consumer brands, Trell was a channel to reach Tier-2 and Tier-3 shoppers through influencer campaigns and live commerce.
Four IIT-Bombay friends start Trell as a lifestyle and travel short-video app.
Trell raises about $250K to build out its community app.
BEENEXT and WEH Ventures back Trell with $1.3M as its creator base grows.
Trell launches Trell Shop and adds Sequoia, KTB Network and Samsung Ventures as backers.
Mirae Asset leads a round with H&M and Samsung Ventures; Trell claims ~50M MAUs.
A board-ordered financial probe stalls fundraising; Trell cuts most of its workforce.
Trell drops e-commerce to return to short video as FY23 revenue falls ~94%.
Peak XV (Sequoia India) is reported to exit its Trell stake at roughly a 78% loss.
Trell is an India-founded lifestyle app where users share and watch short vertical videos about travel, beauty, food and fashion, and - during its social commerce phase - shop products through Trell Shop.
It was founded in 2016 by four IIT-Bombay friends: Pulkit Agrawal, Prashant Sachan, Arun Lodhi and Bimal Kartheek Rebba.
Trell raised about $66 million in total, including a $45 million Series B in 2021 backed by Mirae Asset, H&M and Samsung Ventures.
It was an early, homegrown attempt at regional-language short-video social commerce for Tier-2 and Tier-3 India, reaching a reported 50 million monthly active users.
A 2022 board probe into alleged financial irregularities and a cash crunch led to mass layoffs, a pivot away from e-commerce, and a roughly 94% revenue drop in FY23.
Figures are drawn from public reporting and are approximate; funding, user and revenue numbers reflect the periods cited above.