Meesho clocked ₹30,000 crore of Sales in FY25 - this is approx. 30 lakh orders per day fulfilled by 5 lakh sellers!
They aim to raise ~₹6,500 crore in their upcoming IPO; and it is the first horizontal e-commerce platform to go public in India (Flipkart started 8 years prior btw!)
Meesho’s updated 667 page DRHP is a must read for anyone who follows E-Commerce in India
Here are my 5 key takeaways from the filings⤵️
(1) Meesho has 21 crore active shoppers who place avg. 9+ orders per year 🤯
Few observations v/s their 2024 annual report:
(a) LTM order frequency is up from 9 to 9.5
(b) ATUs (active shoppers) is also up from 18.7 crore to 21.3 crore
(c) Order growth (50% YOY) is outstripping NMV growth (36% YOY) - this is interesting, Meesho is already a value commerce platform - the AOV is declining even further (by design) - to grow the customer base!
AOV has reduced from ₹336 (FY 23) to ~₹270 (Q1 FY26) - worth tracking this for the future! Valmo (check pt 3) is critical to making this AOV decline unit economic sustainable.
PS - I had covered Meesho’s 2024 Annual Report a few months back (bookmark for later):
(2) Scale economies are somewhat questionable….. (my only bear case on this business)
(a) The cost per order is down to ~₹37 in Q1 FY26 from ~₹50 in FY23 👍 Awesome, right?
(b) Well, not really - because AOV has also come down!
(c) As a % of AOV - cost per order is ~13.7% v/s 15% in FY23 - not much has changed…
This actually flows into the Contribution Margin - it remains at ~4.5% in Q1 FY26 v/s the peak ~5.6% in FY24.
Now, I’d also highlight that the bull case here is - AOV decline will plateau and as Meesho moves from 60% Valmo orchestration to ~80%+ orchestration (plus some further tweaks) - this should work just fine (if it doesn’t, don’t ask me).
Meesho launched its own logistics aggregation business (Valmo) in August 2022; Valmo processed 30 crore orders in Q1 FY26 with a team of ~200 employees 🤯
The statistics are eye popping:
(a) Meesho is the highest contributor to e-commerce orders in India (~31% of total)
(b) Meesho has 13.5K partner logistics firms (SMEs mostly) who in-turn work with ~85.5K deliver agents
(c) Valmo’s orchestration network today handles ~62% of Meesho orders v/s 0 approx. 3 years ago!!
For context: In FY25, Valmo handled 75 crore orders i.e. 20 Lakh orders per day! Which is now at a 30 Lakh per day runrate.
RIP E-Commerce Express 🙏 Logistics is an unforgiving business esp. when your anchor customer decides to insource v/s outsource.
PS: I wrote about Valmo when it was launched last year (bookmark & read for later):
(4) Creator led discovery generates ₹1,000 crore in Sales!
As of 30th June, Meesho has ~40K active creators who record short form videos & host live streams to guide Meesho shoppers who contributed ~₹1,000 crore in net Sales for the past 12 months!
(a) Meesho launched the Meesho Creator Club in March ‘23
(b) The creator base is growing fast; it was ~28K as of March ‘25
(c) The 40K active creators produced ~6.8 Lakh pieces of order generating content in the past 12 months!
Note: Creators are directly attributed with ~3% of net Sales of Meesho; this is a far cry from their previous pure re-seller driven model.
Nonetheless, Meesho is a great example of why Brands continue to deploy capital into the Creator Economy - influence & familiarity drives transactions!
(5) COD (Cash On Delivery) is ~75% of orders (even today!)
This statistic might surprise you - but you & I are in the minority of e-commerce shoppers who pre-pay using credit cards 😁
(a) COD as % of total orders is down from ~88% (2023) to ~75% (Q1 FY26); there is a slow but subtle shift from COD to pre-paid orders
(b) However, there is NO improvement in the success rate of COD orders (despite taking control over logistics with Valmo)
Key Q: how does Meesho compare v/s the industry average?
- Meesho (75% COD) is higher than industry average (60%)
- Meesho RTO rate of 25% on COD orders is quite the industry average 😄
Btw, earlier this year, I had done a 20 minute Breakdown video on how Meesho’s creator led value commerce playbook works:
Congratulations to Vidit, Sanjeev, early investors (YC, Good Capital, Venture Highway, PeakXV, Elevation) and the employees 👏
Big win (again) for YC and PeakXV - another IPO filing after Groww
This business has been through 4 distinct avatars & multiple near death moments - Fashnear (hyperlocal fashion), reseller-led group buying, social commerce and now Value E-Commerce.
Meesho’s current Value E-Commerce playbook in a nutshell is: Match long tail unbranded supply to non-metro city demand through video first discovery (via creators) - delivered to the doorstep via a closed loop logistics network.
Discl: Views are my own. DYOR prior to subscribing to any IPO - this post is not an endorsement or paid promotion. Shared for informational purposes only.
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Nykaa has pulled off the best brand acquisition in India in recent years:
In 2021, it spent ~₹97 crore (₹47 crore to buy secondary shares and ₹50 crore of fresh growth capital) to acquire 51% of Kolkata based Dot & Key
Since acquisition:
(a) Revenue is up 18x from ₹27 crore (FY 21) to ₹427 crore (FY25)
(b) Profit is up 30x from ₹1.8 crore (FY 21) to ₹56 crore (FY25)
(c) Dot & Key accounts for 60% of Nykaa’s private label BPC sales
Here is the story of this bootstrapped skincare brand became the crown jewel inside House of Nykaa ⤵️
1️⃣ Founding story
Kolkata based couple Anisha & Suyash started Dot & Key - they initially tried to raise money from investors & were rejected by 200+ investors
In an interview with Jivraj Singh (ISV Capital), Suyash shared their journey:
(a) Anisha was an active swimmer hence wanted to find a sunscreen which could counter chlorine damage while keeping the sun away
(b) whenever friends and family were traveling overseas, she would give them a long list of products she wished to purchase
(c) The duo realized India doesn’t have masks, serums & sunscreens built for Indian skin.
So, Dot & Key started with ₹1 crore of their own money - for the first two years they tried to figure out niches that could work e.g. swim spray, underarm roll-on
The break-out moment for the brand was COVID - sales of their Serums spiked on Nykaa - which also explains why the Nykaa acquisition followed shortly thereafter!
Which brings us to:
2️⃣ Hyperscale post acquisition 📈
The brand was at ~₹35 crore annualized GMV when Nykaa bought 51% (Sept 2021)
In the Q3 FY26 filings, Nykaa revealed that the brand was at ₹1,900 crore annualized GMV
Few reasons for this lightning fast scale-up:
(a) Insight led category expansion: serums first, then sunscreen, then barrier repair / moisturizers
(b) R&D velocity: 28 new SKUs created in FY24 with new SKUs = 30% of Sales. All of these SKUs were created by the in-house R&D lab at Dot & Key
(c) Hero SKUs with unreal customer love: Watermelon cooling sunscreen has 76k+ ratings, gloss boss lip balm SPF50 has 50k+ ratings
(d) Omni-channel distribution: Nykaa has placed its private label products into offline retail via eB2B (20,000+ locations) and its own first party stores (250 odd across India)
(e) Distinct branding: Their hat-capped packaging drew attention in the early days
In Nykaa’s FY25 report, Dot & Key is called out as the key 2nd strategic pillar in the “House of Nykaa” strategy
This was the central theme at the Office Hours session hosted at our BLR office by the OpenAI team with 50+ CTOs & technical founders in attendance.
Here’s what you need to know ⤵️
1️⃣The arc of AI thus far
2023-2024: AI was a Chatbot (pre-trained responses from the Internet)
2024-2025: AI became a Tool (web search, function calling, tool use, connectors, memory etc)
025-2026: AI will become your Teammate (uses tools, on your behalf, to create economic value)
Thomas from OpenAI gave a hint: The newly released 5.4 series models were trained with the research objective of completing “economically valuable” knowledge work.
Here’s how the 5.4 release is closely aligned with the Teammate vision:
2️⃣ 5.4 is the stepping stone for AI to become your teammate
Most models still feel like powerful raw intelligence which need heavy prompting, guardrails, and refinement to produce “professional” output.
GPT 5.4 is different: It has posted the highest score so far on GDPval (83%) which is a significant jump from GPT-5.2 (71%)
For context - GPDval measures model performance on "economically valuable" knowledge-work tasks across 44 professional occupations
Therefore, 5.4 is “professional intelligence in a box” i.e.
(a) 1M token context window means it can retain organizational context
(b) Extra High Reasoning lets it work for hours at a stretch (my longest session was 2.5 hours yesterday)
(c) By subsuming 5.3 Codex - the new model is able to use spreadsheets, docs & other work artefacts like a human being
India allocated ₹76,000 crore to Semiconductors in 2021 - the most successful part of that program was a small ₹1,000 crore corpus for Design Linked incentives (DLI)
In Semis - Chip Fabrication & Chip design are two entirely separate activities - Fabrication is high CAPEX - therefore attracts media attention e.g. Tata’s upcoming logic fab in Dholera
But, IP lies in chip design which is high margin, low CAPEX and R&D intensive
DLI 1.0 has struck the goldmine:
(a) 140 core IP units created
(b) 16 chip designs taped out (at 1/5th cost v/s global peers)
(c) 24 startups supported
(d) 14 of whom raised follow-on funding from VCs
(e) While still have ₹250 crore (25% of corpus) left
Here’s what you need to know about this policy success ⤵️
1️⃣What is the DLI scheme?
DLI was a part of the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 1.0 to provide the following support to fabless chip design startups in India:
- Structured milestone-based reimbursement of labor & other costs during the R&D phase (cap of ₹15 crore per chip project)
- Reimbursement of Sales & Marketing expense post tape-out (cap of ₹30 crore per chip project)
- Access to EDA tools & IPs at a subsidized rate
The mental model to use is:
- DLI provides financial support for IP creation and chip design
- ISM 1.0 provided Govt support for installation of chip fabrication (Fab) & testing (OSAT) capacity
- PLI (Production Linked Incentives) rewards factory output - which has been launched under Budget 2026 expecting the fabs from ISM 1.0 to go live soon
While ISM 1.0 focuses on large CAPEX projects - DLI 1.0 provided risk capital to help with product development in domestic chip design
Since launch in December 2021, DLI 1.0 has disbursed ₹770 crore (out of a ₹1,000 crore corpus) across 24 different chip projects - with incredible results so far:
2️⃣Which companies have been supported under DLI 1.0?
There are 24 distinct fabless chip design startups which received funding under DLI - I’ve picked 8 to highlight below in the table.
The core idea is to use Govt product development “grants” to nudge entrepreneurs to focus on domestic chip requirements to reduce our long term dependency on overseas design & fab companies.
Therefore, you will notice 3 distinct themes:
(1) Most use-cases are Sovereign in nature e.g. video surveillance, drone detection, satellite communications etc
(2) Several use-cases are Strategic in nature (from an import substitution perspective) e.g. edge compute, energy meters
(3) A small set of investors have written high conviction & early cheques into these pre-revenue (and often pre-product! With just LOIs from customers) companies to support their prototyping phase
Häfele, Hindware, LivSpace & several brands have one common contract manufacturer: Noida based Isler
Isler’s founder Pravesh was an MD at Accenture - he left to start Isler in 2022 inspired by the seeing the wave of PLI supported manufacturing startups in India.
Pravesh partnered with his former Accenture colleague Chirag who had Appliances R&D experience from his tenure at LG in India and Korea - they had a simple hypothesis: “Why hasn’t anyone built a world-class kitchen appliance company in India?”
They opened their first major factory in Noida last year from where they manufacture chimneys, built-in hobs, cooktops, ovens, microwaves, dishwashers, air fryers & much more.
Sharing a few notes from the factory visit last week ⤵️
Isler is an ODM (Orignal Design Manufacturer) i.e. it works closely with each of its brand partners to ideate, design, spec & assemble products - it is MUCH more than simple component assembly which typically happens in the EMS space.
When you walk into the Isler factory - you first encounter their Experience Center which has existing product samples & (ready to build) concepts - their clients routinely drop by to test concepts.
In ~2 years of operations, their R&D team has created 100+ SKUs for clients - several of which are now in the production line!
New product development is headed by Varun Ramachandran who had hands on Design & Development experience for Kitchen Appliances at Philips India - the Noida factory has a large R&D lab which we got to tour (can’t share photos from there sadly!)
Isler’s factory has a fully configurable production line - Digital Work Instructions on Screens at each workstation in the production process improve the throughput, reduce the error rate and deliver high quality output to customers.
The quality metrics are mindboggling:
Customer rejection / return rate: 0.04%
Field failure rate: 0.08% (well below the 2% industry threshold)
Like most modern factories - everything was marked & labelled with clear POCs across each part of the factory shopfloor - inbound QC, storage, line, testing, outbound QC, packaging & loading.
I couldn’t take pictures inside the factory - but here’s a walkthrough of the final output:
In August 2023, Shubh left Stable Money to start his own startup - he got off to a flying start by getting an early cheque from EF India, finding his co-founder Saksham and lining up their first few customers.
Exactly a year later - tragedy struck: Shubh was diagnosed with Gullain Bairre Syndrome - a rare neuroglial condition which impacts 1 in 1 Lakh individuals.
In a matter of days, Shubh condition deteriorated significantly - he went from the gym rat I first met to someone who couldn’t even move his limbs!
Shubh was in the ICU for a month - he was fully paralyzed. Saksham took the tough call of shutting down Iterate AI while his co-founder battled for his life in hospital.
Once Shubh got out of the ICU - he had to re-start his life: He learnt how to stand, walk & run again. If you meet him today, you would find it very hard to believe that he was paralyzed less than a year ago!
He’s now lifting 50% of his previous best as an athlete, and the recovery is miraculous 🙏
“Forged by Fire” is the best way to describe what Shubh, his family & his co-founder Saksham went through in 2025.
Saksham started another company and just got admitted to the YC W26 cohort.
Shubh is also back to building with his best friends from KGP - Utsav and Pradeep.
This year, I listened to 16800 minutes of podcasts across 350 downloaded episodes while running, lifting & commuting across 3 continents.
The methodology remains unchanged for the past 3 years - my subjective assessment of the quality of discussion, rarity of guest appearance & relevance of insights shared (all from my own notes taken on Google Keep)
The Top 25 are as follows ⤵️
Founder Interviews:
(1) Dr. Fei-Fei Li (CEO, World Labs) — Lenny’s Podcast
(2) Qasar Younis (CEO, Applied Intuition) — In Depth
In the top founder interviews, Lenny ties with First Round Capital’s In Depth podcast.
Apart from Vald Tenev, the other 5 guests tend to be media shy - in fact Qasar Younis put his first tweet out this year after 18 years of having a Twitter account 😆
Each of these founders has had a cracker year: Clay raised at a $3bn valuation, Intercom was re-born after their AI agent Finn took off, Parag’s redemption after Twitter has come from his new company Parallel ($100M+ raised) etc
Investor Interviews:
(7) Neil Mehta (Greenoaks) — Invest Like the Best
(8) Hemant Taneja (CEO, General Catalyst) — 20VC
(9) Shervin Pishevar — 20VC
(10) Steven Mandel (Founder, Lone Pine) — Joys of Compounding
(11) Martín Escobari (General Atlantic) — Invest Like the Best
(12) Jeff Horing (Co-founder, Insight Partners) — Invest Like the Best
(13) Jay Hoag (Co-founder, TCV) — Invest Like the Best
(14) Joshua Kushner (Founder, Thrive Capital) — Invest Like the Best
In the top investor interviews, “Invest Like The Best” is a clear outlier - this year, the host Patrick has been able to pull real heavyweights into exclusive podcast interviews.
Each of these investors is a GOAT in their own right e.g. Shervin has an impressive 70x MOIC across all his vintage investments to date (!) Hemant has deployed $1bn+ into Stripe alone. Jeff from Insight has 6 members of his global IC who have 25+ year tenure at the firm (!!)
These interviews cover everything from Neil Mehta’s JDCE (Jaw Dropping Customer Experience) framework to Steven Mandel’s Transparency framework.