Thread by @viditaatrey

Super proud to announce that SoftBank Vision Fund is leading our $300M round at $2.1B valuation and partnering in our vision of enabling 100M Small Businesses in India to succeed online. @sumerjuneja @Sarthak_Misra1

A thread on past and future! 🧵

economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/funding/m…

5 years ago, Sanjeev and I observed that even after a decade of e-commerce in India, most small businesses were largely offline.

We decided to work towards bringing all small businesses in India online and give them their “own online shop” with Meesho (“Meri Shop”).

After multiple pivots, we found that millions of women have a dream of starting fashion boutiques but don't have access to capital.

Our team built a one-stop tech platform for them to start their boutiques on social platforms without capital - and the rest is history!

Today, Meesho has 13M+ women entrepreneurs who have sold products to ~50M consumers (3% of India’s population) from 100K+ suppliers, across 4800+ cities / towns. Our monthly transacting entrepreneurs have grown 10X over last 12 months..

Growth mindset is at the heart of Meesho.

Our secret sauce?
Exceptional Talent coupled with High Autonomy and Tech-first mindset. Having one of the highest GMV to Employees ratio in the industry is testament to it. Solving the hardest problems with Technology-first has given us immense leverage and velocity.

Our success in being a Global Category Creator can be attributed to our First Principles Thinking; unique biz model for longtail products, leveraging vast social networks such as Whatsapp, and enabling aspiring women to start a biz with ZERO capital - pure innovation.

During Covid lockdown, when all chips were down, our exceptional team applied first principles thinking again to create a new product - Farmiso. Anyone can start an online grocery shop online with Farmiso without any investment - and it is now our fastest growing biz!

Our existing investors gave a strong vote of confidence in our vision and execution quality as they participated yet again in this round. Thanks to Prosus, Facebook, Venture Highway and others for continuing to believe in us.

In 2021, less than a million SMBs (out of 60M+) in India are online, even though ecom is ~15 yrs old. We are pumped about our mission of building for 100M SMBs and Billion consumers. Join us and be a part of this inspiring journey: careers.meesho.com/#!/