Meesho raises $300 million from SoftBank Vision Fund as valuation races past $2 billion

ET first
reported the details of the deal on February 13.

The corporate’s newest capital elevating train has nearly trebled its valuation in comparison with when it
raised $125 million in 2019. On the time Meesho was valued at round $700 million. This makes it the fourth home startup this 12 months to enter the coveted unicorn membership, comprising personal corporations valued at $1 billion or extra. Different which have joined the highest league in 2021 embrace insurance coverage tech platform Digit, Innovaccer, a well being tech platform and Infra.market, a web based market for development materials.

Meesho’s financing spherical additionally noticed participation from current buyers Prosus Ventures, Facebook, Shunwei Capital, Enterprise Freeway and Knollwood Funding, the corporate mentioned in an announcement on Monday.

“We’re targeted on increasing our imaginative and prescient from specializing in enabling aspiring girls entrepreneurs to creating Meesho as a single ecosystem that can allow all small companies to succeed on-line,” mentioned Vidit Aatrey, founder and CEO at Meesho. “Within the final one 12 months, we now have seen super progress throughout small companies and entrepreneurs in search of to maneuver their companies on-line.”

Meesho mentioned it goals to allow 100 million small companies and entrepreneurs digitise their companies because it expands the scope of its enterprise, whereas investing closely in hiring and rising its crew throughout know-how, product and enterprise capabilities amongst others.

By coming into the house to digitise and repair India’s SMBs, Meesho will go up towards giants reminiscent of Reliance Industries, Amazon, Flipkart and others who’re vying for a piece of this profitable, untapped market. Whereas these corporations are eyeing income by eradicating layers of inefficiency in distribution, in addition they wish to use small companies to achieve clients, particularly in smaller cities.

Then again, Meesho can also be dealing with rising competitors from newer entrants within the social commerce house like Dealshare, Glowroad, Shop101 and Kiko TV, all of whom assist sellers attain clients by way of social networks whereas placing them in contact with suppliers and offering different providers required for e-tailing in India.

“We now have been carefully monitoring Meesho for the final 18 months and have been impressed by their progress, every day engagement metrics, concentrate on unit economics and talent to create a robust crew. We imagine Meesho offers an environment friendly platform for SME suppliers and social resellers to onboard the e-commerce revolution in India and assist them present personalised expertise to customers,” mentioned Sumer Juneja, accomplice at SoftBank Funding Advisers.

Meesho claims that it has enabled 13 million entrepreneurs being promoting on-line by way of its platform and has a base of 45 million clients within the nation. It added that it has onboarded over 65,000 suppliers that promote greater than 5 million merchandise, and has generated Rs 500 crore in earnings for entrepreneurs utilizing its platform.

Munish Varma, managing accomplice at SoftBank Funding Advisers, mentioned, “Through the use of the facility of synthetic intelligence and machine studying, Meesho has created a platform for a lot of small enterprise house owners to promote to the subsequent cohort of web customers. We stay up for being part of this journey.

The corporate added that it has delivered orders to 26,000 pin codes in additional than 4800 cities, with an amazing majority of these being Tier II cities.