E-commerce

Decoding Meesho’s DRHP: a solid ecommerce story, but does it have a strong public market one?

Pranav Balakrishnan

Nikhil Patwardhan

October 21, 2025 | 16 Min Read

Meesho filed its DRHP just as it overtook Flipkart to become India’s largest ecommerce platform by order volume. But beyond its well-established ecommerce success, the company’s new bets in logistics, fintech, and content creation still look too early-stage to move the growth needle significantly.

In early 2015, Vidit Aatrey sat quietly in a women’s boutique in Bengaluru’s Koramangala, watching the shop owner use WhatsApp to sell sarees. No inventory, no website—just trust, screenshots, and relentless hustle. That informal moment became the seed for Meesho, the company Aatrey would co-found later that year with Sanjeev Barnwal. Their thesis was straightforward: India’s next wave of commerce wouldn’t start in malls or marketplaces, but in the group chats of small-town sellers and homemakers with smartphones.

Read this article for free

In addition, access 50+ archived articles and 3 new articles every month

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

Gig workers finally get the recognition. Platforms get a new 1–2% bill to pay

The new labour codes formally recognise India’s 7.7 million gig and platform workers under social security for the first time. But while this closes one long-pending chapter, it opens another: who will pay for India’s gig economy—platforms, customers, or both—and how?

Shivani Verma

VCs ditched Bengaluru for Mumbai, Delhi in 2025...or did they?

India’s top startup hubs saw sharply divergent 2025 trajectories as mega-rounds, weak seed pipelines and uneven liquidity reshaped funding trends. Tracxn's latest data shows a far more selective market, where concentrated capital and maturing city clusters are redefining the flow of venture money.

Team Captable

Smartstaff had the money, the founders, the investors. And it still wasn’t enough

The Bengaluru startup promised to transform how factories and delivery platforms hire workers. Today it’s discovering why traditional contractors with notebooks and employee referral programmes still run the market.

Shivani Verma

Ixigo, Meesho, Rapido, and the quiet rebuild of Prosus’ India strategy

Prosus has shifted from backing category leaders to betting on challengers like Ixigo, Meesho and Rapido. It is rebuilding its India portfolio around operational synergies, PayU’s financial rails, and a cautious AI strategy focused on practical impact over speculative bets.

Nikhil Patwardhan

The great Indian pizza reset: from exotic to everyday

The long-held dominance of Domino's and Pizza Hut is effectively over, as hundreds of technique-driven kitchens now set the tone for innovation and taste, catering to a population that is more health-conscious than ever.

Team Captable

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