Trine in 2025 – Review after 7 turbulent years of investing

This is an update from my previous post in 2020, reflecting my changing experience with Trine.

Trine at a glance

The star rating reflects my impression of the provider after investing with them since 2018.

Category	Crowdfunded Loans, fixed return
Country of origin	Sweden (offers are denominated in Euros)
Geographical focus of investments	Mainly Asia and sub-saharan Africa
Minimum investment	€25 per project
Terms	Interest: 5-8% (up to 12% with profit-sharing loans) Loan duration: 3-5 years (up to 15 years with profit-sharing loans)
Cost	None for investors. Trine takes a cut of the interest payments received by the borrowers.
Internal Rate of Return (IRR)*	IRR of my own portfolio with the provider over the last 5 years: 2.69%
Referral programme	€25 for both the existing and new customer. If you don’t have a friend already investing with Trine, you can use one of the following links to support this blog with an exclusive bonus for Invest4Change readers: 25€ for investing €100 or more 50€ for investing €1000 or more
Similar offers	Lendahand.com (see review) Energise Africa Abundance (see review) Enerfip

*including interest, fees and losses from defaults, as of Sept 2025. Please note that the IRR is merely intended to give you a real-life view of how an actual user’s portfolio (mine) developed over time. Yours could look better or worse, depending on the projects you choose.

How investing through Trine creates Impact

Trine.com is a Swedish for-profit impact investing start-up that crowdfunds loans to African Asian companies. These use the funds to develop their projects, often solar installations. Solar power addresses a key problem in many developing countries. Unlike in rich countries, electricity grids in much of the developing world are unreliable even in cities. In rural areas, they might not even exist at all.

Trine’s origins are in solar home systems for families, where they funded small sets of photovoltaics (PV) to provide a family with enough power for light, phone charging or a TV. Unfortunately, this approach ended with several investments defaulting (more on that below).

New strategy, new luck

So Trine shifted their focus to projects for businesses (B2B). Bad power grids are also a major pain for companies. They either have to suffer expensive production interruptions when power is lost or operate expensive – and polluting – diesel generators as a backup. Replacing these with solar panels, increasingly also batteries, reduces emissions while improving the foundations for economic growth in these communities. As a result, there is a lively ecosystem of solar companies across Africa, Asia and Latin America who buy and install PV installations on companies’ roofs. But this is costly and revenues only trickle in as the installations generate power over the years. To keep growing in the meantime, they need funding. That’s where Trine comes in.

As I am writing this, Trine is funding several companies: Vu Phong and Stride Solar, both based in Vietnam, follow the approach described above. Bisedge, in Nigeria, distributes and operates electric forklifts that replace diesel-powered models. Trine has been funding all three for a while now, providing them with a continuous stream of crowdfunded capital to grow. In November 2025, Trine finally added two new borrowers, a solar company in Mexico and an e-mobility firm in Indonesia.

But before sending a nice thick envelope with cash to Nigeria (jk, that’s not how it works), Trine conducts their Due Diligence. That’s to say they examine the company’s business model, strategy, management etc., not to mention their impact. Trine has a strong focus on the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and they report each project’s impact on them. The borrower is then rated on a scale from A-D. As can be expected, the lower the rating, the higher the risk and thus also the interest you can expect.

Terms

Promised returns are decent at around 5-8%, with the loan being amortised (i.e. slowly paid back) over 3-5 years. That’s in line with what other impact investment platforms offer. In 2024, Trine also started offering Profit-sharing loans with their borrower Vu Phong, something I haven’t seen anywhere else so far. Here’s how it works:

Unlike with a normal loan, which has a fixed interest over the entire duration, a profit-sharing loan’s payback varies depending on the borrower’s profitability. If profits are high, you get up to 12% on your investment – if they are low, there is a floor of 8%. So you will not end up without interest. At the same time, the maturity is much longer, at 15 years. But this doesn’t mean you have to wait 15 years to get your money back. Your investment, the pricinipal, is paid back within the first 9 years, but you still benefit from additional repayments for the following 6 years.

In a webinar they once explained that this was part of their drive to improve the risk-return profile of their investment. Because their investments are inherently risky, they have to provide higher returns to make the investment attractive for investors. Still, the borrower should pay a lower interest rate than with a conventional bank. Their solution was the profit-sharing model. We’ll see how it pans out.

Trine used to have different reward tiers, with added interest if you invested more, but it seems they have phased these out in favour of the profit sharing model.

Usability

Trine boasts a userfriendly, modern site. The portfolio page allows you to see the distribution and diversification of your assets across different countries and borrowers.

Trine is very impact-oriented and they want you to see how your money is working for positive change in the world. They use the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as a framework and show your portfolio’s contribution to each of the goals. That’s obviously very difficult because impact is not always measurable, but I think it’s still a good approach.

My rollercoaster experience with Trine

Trine is a good example for the risks and rewards that come along with impact investing. Early on, Trine’s focused on solar home systems (SHS) for poor rural families, due to the double social/environmental impact. And for the first year or so, almost all my payments were on time. When a friend, who was working in the sector warned me that no SHS company had ever been profitable, I did not heed her advice. I was only looking at the juicy 8.5% interest and kept investing for over a year.

But then, in late 2019, things changed when my first project in Myanmar defaulted. Things worseed even more during Covid-19, when more and more companies got into trouble. But the pandemic only reinforced what my friend had been telling me: hardly any of these companies were on the road to profitability. For me, these defaults ate up half of all my returns! As a result, my portfolio’s performance is at a measly 2.69% (IRR over 5 years).

I can live with less profit if I know that my money contributed to improving people’s lives. Still, let this be a lesson to all to not let your greed get the better of you!

A default is a default. But in their defence, Trine was always proactive and transparent in their communications about status of troubled borrowers. They occasionally asked investor’s agreement for certain measures to help deal with the situation.

Since then, Trine has changed their strategy, moving away from SHS towards projects aimed at companies. This strategy seems to be paying off, since, to my knowledge, none of the new loans are in difficulty. My portfolio is much healthier now, which gave me the confidence to once again increase my Trine investments!

Conclusion: Pros and Cons of investing with Trine

I may always be a bit biased when it comes to Trine, since it was my first real impact investment. So, even after temporarily losing several thousand Euros, I’m still convinced by Trine’s model and the direction they’re taking. Impact-wise, their focus on businesses supports a major social problem in many developing countries, the lack of jobs. Based on my own experience, it was also the right call to better balance returns and risks. Finally, I applaud their decision to engage with parts of their community to develop their platform and services – a key step to create trust for the future!

💚 Actual impact investing in both cleantech and economical development. Many of the companies funded might have difficulties getting money from other investment or at higher cost.

💚 Returns The Swedish platform offers attractive returns, especially with its profit-sharing loans – if you are comfortable with a 15-year repayment horizon.

💚 Usability Trine’s website is very attractive and easy to use, giving you most important information at a glance. The investment process is also quite straightforward, although you of course have to go through some regulatory steps first.

💚/🚫 Transparency After some criticism regarding their transparency and lack of publicly available due diligence, Trine now lists each borrower’s key strengths and weaknesses. But it’s still not possible to view the borrower’s financial figures, which is common practice elsewhere.

🚫 Mixed track record Trine’s self-declared default rate is at 5.1% and therefore reasonably high. Most of that was due to a wave of defaults in 2019-2021 and they have since taken credible steps to reduce risk. But it remains to be seen if these will pay off.

Get a boost for your first Trine investment!

Are you now keen on investing with Trine? If so, you can use one of the following links receive a starting bonus and support this blog:
25€ for investing €100 or more
50€ for investing €1000 or more (exclusive offer for readers of Invest4Change