Trell to dismiss half of its workforce due to funding fallout
Influencer led social commerce startup Trell is on the verge of letting go of around 40-50% of its workforce. The fall-out of investment talks has led to this layoff. The company has overall 700 employees with 500 full time employees.
Trell was also in conversations with Amazon and others to raise $50-60 million to go past the $1 billion valuation mark but the conversation didn’t move beyond the preliminary stage. Trell claims to have over 60 million monthly active users on the platform and offers content in multiple categories across 12 languages such as Hindi, Tamil, English, among other languages.
Trell offers a mobile app that lets users make and share three-minute videos around their interests and passions, in categories such as beauty, recipes, fashion, personal care, technology and gadgets, movies and TV reviews.
Trell is also under an investigation for alleged financial irregularities. A forensic team from EY India has now submitted an interim report. The team is looking into alleged related-party transactions by its founders and other financial irregularities. Trell’s board of directors is likely to act on the EY report over the next few weeks.
One of Trell’s spokespersons said, “In order to ensure that our internal systems and processes kept with our progress, we recently conducted a regular review. In light of the findings, the board has taken a decision to focus on a few core initiatives and strengthen our systems and processes before we plan to raise the next round of funding. Unfortunately, this also means that we will have to do some right-sizing within the firm. This can entail some roles getting redundant while there will be new roles that will also be added. We remain deeply committed to our stakeholders and aligned to our vision.”
The company is also looking to sell its stake in AppsForBharat, a product studio for spiritual and devotional content, launched in November 2020. Its backers include Elevation Capital, Sequoia Capital India, BeeNext and Matrix Partners India. Trell owns about 10% in the company without any governance rights.
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