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

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

India must build the electro-intelligence stack

Even as India turns its focus to the AI race, there's a growing opportunity to build for the electric stack—augmenting physical technologies like motors, pumps, and heat pumps with intelligence that makes them more efficient and responsive.

K Yatish Rajawat

Org Chart: Inside BigBasket’s C-Suite shuffles and tweaks for a quick commerce era

As BigBasket pivots to quick commerce, it has added leaders, built specialised teams, and freed founders to focus on strategy and fundraising. Yet even as it chases faster delivery and battles lost market share, it holds on to the cultural ethos built a decade ago.

Pranav Balakrishnan

ChatGPT at ₹399, Perplexity for free: Inside Big Tech’s AI subscription war for India

India is fast becoming global AI’s biggest playground. Big Tech is chasing mass adoption over monetisation with loss-leading strategies. But in a value-obsessed market, long-term sustainability lies in pricing sweet spots, bundling, and whether AI can become as essential as UPI or WhatsApp.

Sohini Mitter

From YouTube to Dalal Street: Inside PhysicsWallah’s public market play

Once dismissed as a scrappy YouTube channel, PhysicsWallah is heading for an IPO after becoming an unlikely survivor in India’s battered edtech sector. Its offline push, bold deals, and looming risks set the stage for Co-founder Alakh Pandey’s toughest exam yet: winning over public investors.

Nikhil Patwardhan

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