SoftBank partners in Meesho’s vision of enabling 100M Indian small businesses to succeed online. A message from Co-Founder & CEO Vidit Aatrey
A very big day for all of us at Meesho as we kickstart the next Financial Year.
I’m extremely thrilled to announce that SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is leading our $300M Series E round at $2.1B valuation and partnering in our vision of enabling 100M small businesses in India to succeed online.
I’m excited to share our journey today and what’s coming next!
Five years ago Sanjeev Barnwal and I observed that even after a decade of e-commerce in India, small businesses were mostly offline — and that resonated with us as an opportunity to bring them online and give them their “own online shop” with Meesho (“Meri Shop”).
We built the product, tested the market and after multiple pivots found that it were women homemakers who were actively using our product to sell to their customers. We realised that millions of women in India have a dream of starting boutiques but don’t have access to capital. Our team then built a one-stop-shop tech platform for them to start these boutiques on social platforms without any investment — and the rest is history!
The strong desire of these aspiring women entrepreneurs was a testament to our PMF and the future growth, which has always been the mindset at Meesho.
Today we have enabled 13M+ women entrepreneurs who have sold to~50M consumers (~3% of India’s population) from 100K+ suppliers, across 4,800+ cities / towns. Our monthly transacting entrepreneurs has grown 10X over the last 12 months.
I’ve come to realise that our secret sauce for such stupendous growth has been our exceptional talent coupled with high autonomy and a tech-first mindset. Solving the hardest problems with a technology-first mindset has given us immense leverage, velocity and hence the growth.
In our journey so far we have seen multiple Meesho for X, solidifying my belief that we have truly been a Global Category Creator. And I can firmly attribute that tag to our First Principles Thinking. Creating a new business model for longtail/unbranded products, leveraging social networks such as Whatsapp, and enabling aspiring women to start a business with ZERO capital — that’s pure innovation and novelty.
Finding opportunities is in the DNA of our team. During COVID induced lockdown our brilliant team leveraged our entrepreneur network to create Farmiso — a social commerce for fresh produce and groceries. With Farmiso, which is also our fastest growing biz, now anyone can start an online grocery store with ZERO investment.
Everything we have done so far is to help small businesses and individual entrepreneurs.
I’m excited and energised about our vision of enabling 100M SMBs to succeed online and getting the next billion users to transact online.
Join us and be a part of this inspiring journey to shape India’s next decade of e-commerce here.
I want to take this opportunity to thank all of our existing investors in partnering with us on this incredible journey. The latest investment round saw participation from Prosus Ventures, Facebook, Shunwei Capital, Venture Highway and Knollwood Investment — a BIG thank you!
Onwards and Upwards to the next 10X phase of Meesho!
