Rahul Mathur Profile picture
Oct 22 7 tweets 5 min read Read on X
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):

x.com/Rahul_J_Mathur…Image
(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).Image
(3) Valmo (Meesho’s logistics arm) delivers 20-30 Lakh orders per day!

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):

x.com/Rahul_J_Mathur…Image
(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!Image
(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:

youtu.be/iraHLFVcTRc?si…Image
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.

➡️ Download UDRHP here: investor.meesho.com/ipo-disclosure…

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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More from @Rahul_J_Mathur

Dec 1
Policybazaar today has 5,000 Sales personnel and another 2,000 who work in Claims processing.

PB isn’t unique - the entire insurance industry in India employs 1000s of people whose entire job is to write email follow-ups, make phone call follow-ups and format Excel documents.

In fact, for a small 35 person Sales team at my company in 2022 - we had ~2 persons whose full time job was “co-ordination” with insurers, customers and the sales team.

Insurance is one industry where AI can make the biggest dent - PB is leading the charge here ⤵️
What is PB’s edge?

(1) 100% of calls are transcribed into text format which provides a rich training data set for AI Sales agents (per Q4 FY 25 earnings deck)

(2) 16+ years of claims data history - mostly stored in emails & PDFs - this is the perfect starting point to build an AI claims assistant

(3) B2C / digital heavy business where data is shared directly by the customer (via auditable channels) - AI systems are pure GIGO - if your agent mistypes customer info then everything downstream goes wrong from there.

Btw, almost everything in Insurance today has been touched (most unsuccessfully) by the previous generation of RPA - everything will again be re-written in the era of AI automation.Image
Some specific examples of how PB is leveraging AI:

(1) During the Life Insurance onboarding call via a “liveliness check model”

- This has led to cancellation of ~3.7% of Life Insurance policies booked for various reasons such as fake identity, age misrepresentation, impersonation etc (per Q4 FY 25 earnings deck)

(2) Re-built their tele-calling CRM with several AI features
- These AI features cover everything from lead allocation to smart nudges to intent analysis (per Q1 FY26 earnings deck)
- Previously, calls were being sample for manual audits - now AI does the call audits (scores the caller across various parameters)

(3) In the credit business, they have launched a “DigiAgent” which does screening of leads before handing over to a human agent
- False positives under 1%
- Already 100+ human agents are working with “DigiAgent” (per the earnings call for Q4 FY25)Image
Read 4 tweets
Nov 25
Dunzo’s founder Kabeer Biswas is starting “Dunzo 2.0” - he’s apparently raising ~$12M for a personal concierge company

In the same space - TryFaff has raised from Nexus Ventures, Indulge Global raised money from Nikhil Kamath, some co’s like Pinch Lifestyle are bootstrapping, Swiggy launched Crew etc

The personal concierge space in India has blown up in the past ~45 days; I’ve been tracking this space for a year now - it is a natural extension of the Quick Home Services theme (Snabbit, Pronto, Insta Help by UC etc)

Below are some snippets from our investment thesis (for an un-named company)⤵️
(1) Four arcs of Labor Leverage 🏋️

Unorganized → Organized → On-demand → Orchestrated

Labor Leverage (i.e. outsourcing work) becomes increasingly expensive as you move from left to right

Unorganized → Organized: We pay a convenience fee to Urban Company to get a plumber booking scheduled OR for Swiggy to deliver an order to our house.

Organized → On-demand: Some of us pay a surge fee to get groceries delivered via Quick Comm; once the discount wave ends - we’ll do the same for InstaHelp, Snabbit and Pronto

On-demand → Orchestrated: VERY few Indians have this. Please read on:

The “elite” (Indian) class doesn’t book on UC, Blinkit, MMT or even AMEX Platinum Concierge. They have a House Manager (₹50K - ₹1L monthly CTC resource) to manage this workload for them.

Typically, this House Manager will also liaison with your EA to ensure work & personal life is orchestrated - remember movies where the top honcho would get passed a slip of paper in a meeting - that is exactly what I’m referring to here.

A significant part of India’s metro population has started to pay for Unorganized → Organized (maybe 3 crore) & Organized → On-demand (maybe 30L people).

On-demand → Orchestrated is the next big theme for Labor Leverage startups in India✌️
(2) Orchestration is (not) new in India yet…. GreyLabs founder Aman Goel got crucified online for talking about this

If you grew up in an upper middle class household even in the early 2000s - you had a tenured domestic help who just ran the house - groceries shopping, cash withdrawal from bank, puja planning etc.

This help was an orchestrator of your house - (s)he seldom did the work but made sure someone else got the work done. Your family trusted them.

Btw, orchestration in professional life is very commonplace - my grandfather worked at a Japanese MNC and had an assistant back in the 80s.

Note: Anyone who says “this is what my wife does” also needs to realize that some people have partners who are gainfully employed (unlike you)

Now, coming to my friend Aman Goel @amangoeliitb - he wrote about how he hired a ₹1L monthly CTC “House Manager” and the comments (which are worth reading for comedy quotient) reveal ONE thing:

💡Orchestration (in personal life) is a NEW concept for most metro residents in India

Aman's post: x.com/amangoeliitb/s…
Read 8 tweets
Nov 5
I made my 1st trip to Chennai to attend the annual Speciale DeepTech Summit this week

Speciale has been an OG DeepTech investor in India (portfolio includes Agnikul Cosmos, GalaxEye, ePlane Co & several others) - they recently raised a ₹600 Fund III

The Summit was a single day event which had ~350+ attendees (Speciale LPs, portfolio founders & other investors like me) - sharing a few observations from the event ⤵️
(1) The showstopper: Unmannd (UAV || Defense) 🪖

- Unmannd is founded by Yeshwanth (IIT B graduate) who also started Aereo (India’s largest drone-based mapping/survey company; raised ~$23M to date)

- They had a TITAN 30 series UAV on display; this is their logistics drone capable of carrying 30 kgs payload

- The supply chain & components are optimized to a great degree; primarily indigenous contents and in-house battery packs

- Next technical milestone here is to do a demo of their counter-EW capability (i.e. ability to operate in presence of signal jammers)

- The company raised ~$2M from Speciale & Accel India recently

The key insight for me from Unmannd’s presentation was that in a ~₹2,000 crore Defense tender for GNSS denied navigation systems - there was NO domestic players who successfully cleared trials (!)

Unmannd has placed bids for several military tenders too.

Yeshwanth & Hemaditya are very clear about their mission: To build the world’s leading Defense focused UAV platform - starting with logistics & then moving into counter UAV systems.Image
Image
(2) The portfolio spotlight: Uravu Labs (Water) 💧

Now, your 1st instinct might be - “how is this water bottle company a DeepTech company?” But, there is more than meets the eye:

- Uravu Labs has designed its proprietary “FromAir” system that create high‑purity water from ambient air using renewable heat sources

- This NIT Calicut team has been working on the business since they faced a major drought while in college - it has been 8 years since they started!

- Their “FromAir” branded water is sold to HoReCa & select MNC office clients - this was an intermediate source of revenue while the team has been working on Tech maturity.

For those of you who follow the Data Center build-out, you would know that Cooling is the largest single OPEX line item. Uravu Labs is seeing adoption of its technology in high end data centers.

It is still early days - but there is a possibility that Uravu Labs would be able to reduce cooling spending materially - since their system is able to ingest heat exhaust from DCs & convert this to water - in the process creating a cooling effect

Uravu Labs has raised ~$4.7M to date across several rounds - DeVC had invested in the company’s Pre-Seed round back in March 2023Image
Read 6 tweets
Nov 3
Urban Company today faces the same Innovator’s Dilemma which Zomato faced 2.5 years ago

Zomato acquired Blinkit in June ‘22 to take on Zepto & Instamart in Quick Commerce - it was considered a fad then; today Blinkit is larger (NOV basis) as compared to the Zomato by a large margin.

UC’s Q2 FY26 tell a similar story: The overall loss is driven by investment into Insta Help (UC’s quick home services arm in India)

UC has NO choice but to do this because of how hot the Quick Home Services market is - Snabbit has raised $50M+, Pronto has raised $14M+ and there is a new clone popping up every fortnight.

I’ve tracked this space closely - sharing my thesis on what is happening below ⤵️
First, let us see how Insta Help has been scaling within UC:

(a) Launched in Feb ‘25 in select pin codes in Mumbai (around the time the news of Snabbit’s $1M Seed round was announced)

(b) QoQ it has grown ~10X from ~₹1 crore Sales in Q1 FY26 to ~₹9.9 crore Sales in Q2 FY26

(c) Oct ‘25 itself was ~₹8.6 crore Sales - the trajectory is upward!

The growth is explosive - naturally the losses will pile up (same happened during the early frenzy of Quick Commerce expansion days in ‘22 and ‘23)

I can already see the consumer behavior shift - several of my own colleagues who recently moved cities don’t employ a full time help - they book on Insta Help or one of the other platforms!

Remember: Don’t look at the gross transaction value - look at Net Sales (after discount). It is too early to look at Revenue from Ops (i.e. after partner payout) because this business is NOT fully optimized as yet - per my own offline chats with the service executives (who are currently on generous minimum guarantees)Image
Below is verbatim what I shared internally:

(1) Quick Home Services (InstaHelp) is a bi-weekly frequency service v/s slotted home services (UC) which is a bi-monthly service.

(2) There is a clear consumer behavior shift from slotted commerce to on-demand commerce. The same will apply in home services too (slotted to on-demand)

(3) Furthermore, like how on-demand commerce is capturing wallet share from slotted commerce - the same will happen in home services.

(4) It is absolutely necessary that UC incubates Instahelp - similar to how Zomato incubated Blinkit - else, Snabbit and Pronto will capture a large amount of wallet share in Quick Home Services

(5) Wallet/Market share = Mind share. The winner in on-demand home services might also capture a sizeable chunk of the slotted home services market.

Caveat to my analogy: The JTBD (”task”) in Quick Home Services is different - cleaning & washing (low skill) v/s installation & maintenance (skilled labor). However, the “moat” is very much the same - training & retention of high quality supply (which UC has a 10 year head start with)

Btw, I had extensively written about Quick Home Services earlier this year (bookmark for reading):

x.com/Rahul_J_Mathur…
Read 4 tweets
Nov 1
One of the big winners in India’s IPO gold rush is Redseer - a market research consulting firm.

Lenskart, Meesho, Urban Company, Swiggy, Vishal Mega Mart, Nykaa, FirstCry, BlueStone & LG Electronics - all have one thing in common: They have paid Redseer to do an industry report as part of the IPO marketing material

For e.g. Lenskart will be paying ~₹1.9 crore to Redseer for its report & other consultancy services as part of the IPO roadshow (more details below)

If you are a professional investor then Redseer is popular name - but if you aren’t then here are a few interesting facts you need to know ⤵️
First, who is Redseer?

(a) Redseer was founded in BLR back in 2009 by a young IIT-Delhi grad Anil Kumar; fully bootstrapped to date; the business does ~$25M+ in revenue today (my estimate based on online sources)

(b) The idea behind Redseer was to create a domestic equivalent to the MBB consulting firms - with a specific focus on new economy companies (the startup world)

(c) Redseer started by doing a lot of market research projects but has slowly moved up the “Strategy value chain” to do MBB-type CXO consulting projects.

Pretty interesting & niche consulting business!
Now that you understand Redseer - let us go to the crux:

(1) Is this legal?

- Yes, this is considered part of the IPO roadshow expenses (Advertising & Marketing)
- As long as it is disclosed in the DRHP shared with the public
- In fact, Redseer has to provide a consent letter to allow its report to be published alongside the IPO documents

(2) Isn’t there a conflict of interest?

- The naive answer is yes - but there is a LOT of nuance.
- The industry report is part of the IPO material submitted to SEBI for review; so it is subjected to the SAME scrutiny as the offer documents (sources, cross Qs etc)
- Redseer itself would NOT misrepresent industry facts - because its own subscribers & customers (i.e. institutional investors) will review this material; IF they write BS - they will lose credibility & customers 🙂

(3) Why Redseer and why not the investment bankers?

- SEBI requires the IPO docs to have industry stats quoted from a reliable third party expert
- To some extent, Redseer is a credible 3rd party to comment on new-age industries; hence it is roped in
- Whereas, the specialty of the investment bankers is often not in market analysis but rather running the IPO process (roadshow, valuation, compliance etc)
Read 4 tweets
Oct 27
Sify Infinit’s 560 page DRHP is a masterclass on the Data Center (DC) market in India

Apart from covering the nuances of its own business, Sify has also included a primer on India’s 5GW ambition for FY30 and the challenges that lie ahead

After China, India has the lowest cost per MW of DC capacity - we plan to almost X3 our DC capacity in the next 5 years.

Sharing a few takeaways ⤵️
(1) Energy is 44% of total expenses

- This data point confirms what several industry reports have pointed out: Energy is the single largest OPEX component of a DC

- This % has been on a downward trend for Sify from ~47% to ~38% - driven by shifting to more Renewables & operational efficiency

PS: PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is the KPI for measuring energy efficiency; Sify doesn’t provide this figure in its DRHP

- However, Sify does shared that 27% improvement in PUE in FY24; driven by 20% reduction in energy leakages.

- Btw, Sify passes these costs on to its customer (this is part of the Colocation DC operating model - more on this below).

Imp nuance (can skip too): Industry avg. PUE in India is close to 1.5 - versus high end DCs in USA which are at 1.1 i.e. they are able to reduce energy wastage by ~40% (hence, can operate at Energy as ~30% of COGS).Image
(2) India is really DC capacity starved!

Don’t even bother zooming into the capacity utilization chart - the mature DCs operate at 98% to 100% capacity (!!)

- For context: Global average vacancy for mature DCs is ~6%; Sify is close to 2% for mature sites

- It takes anywhere from 3 to 24 months post operationalization for a DC to start seeing high capacity utilization

- On a overall basis, utilization is up from 84.7% to 86.2% DESPITE growing operational capacity from 77MW to 113 MW (i.e. ~50%) in past 2.5 years

It was one thing to read about this from an industry POV (Kotak MF and JM Financial) but very interesting to see it in a company’s filings 🙂Image
Read 7 tweets

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