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

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.