Meesho | YourStory

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Meesho

From homemakers to entrepreneurs, the social commerce way

Meesho is creating an environment where anyone can start their business with zero investment. By 2020, the startup aims to create about 20 million micro-entrepreneurs. Meesho is a social commerce platform that undertakes retail distribution, enabling small retail merchants to connect and sell their products effectively via social media channels. The word meesho means ‘my shop’, and the hook of the company is to enable people to start their business from home without any investment which is the biggest problem that any small business faces in starting a business. There are over two million resellers on the Meesho platform and more than 20,000 manufacturers from more than 500 towns who get distribution through Meesho across the country. The biggest validation for the company happened when Facebook invested in the company. Till date, the startup has raised $215.2 million in funding. Meesho works on approximately 10-15 percent commission and sellers can earn with Meesho by adding a profit margin on every sale. Talking about the growth, the company saw a 50X growth in two consecutive years and the growth in the number of orders (HY18 to HY19) counts to 1451 percent.

Social Commerce

E-Commerce

WEBSITE

https://meesho.com

HEADQUARTERS

Bangalore, Karnataka, India

COMPANY SIZE

750+ Employees

FOUNDED

2015

Stories

Stories about Meesho

Meesho buys back ESOPs worth $1 million

Thimmaya Poojary

ECOMMERCE

Facebook-backed Meesho witnesses 14x rise in revenue in FY19

Debolina Biswas

ECOMMERCE

Flipkart, Bigbasket, Meesho, and others celebrate the joy of giving with Daan Utsav

Tenzin Norzom

SOCIALSTORY

Nandan Nilekani on building businesses; UpClose with Meesho’s Vidit Aatrey

Team YS

DAILY CAPSULE

Awards

Awards and Recognitions

50 Disruptive Startups of India - 2019

A YourStory list of startups in 2019 with groundbreaking ideas that are creating a deep impact.

Meesho is a mobile-first social commerce platform for small businesses that typically use WhatsApp and Facebook to keep in touch with customers. It is touted to be one of India’s first reselling app, providing an ‘escape route’ to homemakers. The Bengaluru-based startup helps resellers and emerging brands build businesses using social media. Facebook recently made an undisclosed investment in the startup - the social media giant’s first in a startup in India. In a span of four years, Meesho has emerged as a disruptive retail distribution platform by empowering housewives, aspiring entrepreneurs, and students to launch, build, and promote their business online via social media, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. India is a heterogeneous market with swathes of areas and sectors being dismally unorganised, thus spurring the need for tech intervention and reliable marketplaces to bring businesses and people together. Such unorganised and heterogenous markets pose a lot of issues – high fixed and working capital costs, huge unsold inventory, a narrow selection of products and low customer purchase frequency. While social apps have seen a lot of traction in Bharat, social commerce is still in its early days in the country: while 300 million people use social apps like Facebook on a regular basis, less than 100 million of them buy online – trust and discovery being the biggest issues. Meesho, which has stated its vision is to enable an environment where anyone can start their business with zero investment, is solving for these problems, by providing micro-entrepreneurs with trusted supply, social sharing tools, efficient logistics, and payment capabilities. Started with apparels, Meesho now sells a range of products, including cosmetics, jewellery, accessories, and kitchenware, and the products are tailor-made according to the preferences of the customers across regions. According to its RoC filings accessed by YourStory, Meesho reported a revenue of Rs 84.88 crore for FY19. The revenue has increased by 14x from Rs 6.01 crore in FY18. By 2020, Meesho aims to create about 20 million micro-entrepreneurs.