E-commerce

Meesho looks to balance lower burn and growth. Will it work?

Aditi Shrivastava

June 07, 2022 | 6 Min Read

After hitting quarterly GMV of $1 billion in March, 2021’s breakout ecommerce player Meesho is tempering its aggressive growth expectations and paring marketing budget. Can it hold on to its base of 35 million monthly transacting users and boost ad revenues?

Vidit Aatrey, the founder and CEO of Meesho, doesn’t like to settle for the ordinary, or the minimum. This reflects in how he runs the $4.9-billion company, raises capital and picks sectors to compete in.

In early 2021, Meesho surpassed funded rivals Shop101 and GlowRoad to emerge as India’s largest reseller platform. Any entrepreneur would have taken this win. But Aatrey, an IIT-Delhi grad in his early 30s, parlayed the success into a larger ecommerce play.

Meesho today earns over 70% of its revenues from selling wares to consumers directly. It boasts over 100 million monthly active users, including 35 million who transact monthly, according to two people involved with the company.

With this flip, its competitors are no longer social-commerce startups, most of which have consolidated or wound up, but the big boys — Flipkart, Reliance and Amazon.

Corporate

Access unlimited content at a special discounted rate. Trusted by top VC’s and leading organizations, we provide bulk subscriptions for groups of 30+. Contact us for more details

Campus

Top educational institutions have collaborated with us for campus-wide subscriptions. For bulk campus-wide access, please get in touch.

Join our community of 100,000+ top executives, VCs, entrepreneurs, and brightest student minds

Trusted by the best

Karthik Reddy

Blume Ventures

The CapTable brings a refreshing set of insights for us at the Blume team, highlighting stories that bring together the underlying business and founders with that of investors' journeys with these startups. It's an important perspective that very few bring to startup ecosystem enthusiasts.

Latest Articles

How RuPay is rewiring India’s credit card market, one QR code at a time

RuPay is rewriting India’s credit playbook. By merging UPI with microspends, it is bringing crores of first-time users into the fold while also enticing affluent customers with rewards. The subtext is bigger: With credit firmly moving onto UPI rails, RuPay could potentially upend Visa & Mastercard.

Sohini Mitter

Key vendor dilemma complicates Micron’s showcase project in Gujarat

Korean substrate maker Simmtech’s pullback on a Sanand facility over pollution rules has slowed Micron’s India debut. The US firm says it is exploring other options.

Pratap Vikram Singh

Why online brands need to take the Northeast shopper more seriously

Consumers in the Northeast are outpacing the rest of India in online spending, driven by high internet penetration, global cultural influences, and brand loyalty

Parvathi Benu

Groww’s $8 billion IPO puts fintech valuations to the test

India’s fintech unicorns are lining up for IPOs, but unlike Groww—which seemingly has grown into its valuation—many will face the hard reality of rerating unless they quickly prove their growth and profitability stories.

Nikhil Patwardhan

The overlooked barriers to India’s next ecommerce boom cycle

India has more online shoppers than almost any country but China. Quick commerce is its big win, but in the other two global waves reshaping ecommerce, it’s falling behind peers like Brazil and Indonesia.

Pranav Balakrishnan

Convinced that The Captable stories and insights
will give you the edge?

Convinced that The Captable stories
and insights will give you the edge?

Subscribe Now

Stories

Explore