Draft:Meesho (Draft)

Meesho is an India-based social commerce platform headquartered in Bangalore.

Concept
Meesho operates a three-end marketplace that connects suppliers (manufacturers or distributors) and resellers with customers on social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. The resellers buy listed products from the suppliers and make commission on each transaction when they sell to customers.

Start-up phase
Fashnear under Fashnear Technologies Private Limited was establised by IIT Delhi graduates Vidit Atre and Sanjeev Baranwal in July, 2015 as an on-demand delivery service like Swiggy but for fashion products from local shops. The startup failed. The founders came up with the idea of enabling small resellers to sell their products by creating a convenient online platform, Meesho, with the help of social media sites as tools for marketing.

Growth
Meesho had 209,000 users and 1.2 million orders per month in February 2019 and 563,000 users and 3.1 million orders per month in March 2020.

Meesho saw a big growth during 2021 and 2022. Meesho’s monthly transacting user count rose 26 times during 2020-2022. Globally, Meesho was among the top most downloaded apps on digital stores in 2021. In 2022, Meesho had about 120 million monthly users and about 910 million orders were made through the platform. In terms of The gross merchandise value (GMV) increased 9 times in two years and was at about $5 billion in 2022 as against Flipkart’s $23 billion. Meesho became one of India’s fastest growing e-commerce platform.

Funding and Revenue
Meesho is funded by several investment companies– Fidelity, Softbank, Prosus, B Capital Group , Sequoia Capital, Elevation Capital and Meta. Meesho held many funding rounds. In 2019, it raised 25 million USD funded by Meta Platforms and became the first startup in India to receive investment from Facebook. In September, 2021, Meesho, announced round F of funding of US$570 Million led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and B Capital Group. In 2021, the company announced that it had raised approximately US$1.1 Billion in funding thus far and currently has a cash buffer of US$400 million.