Nykaa not good representation of India’s e-commerce industry, says Meesho co-founder Vidit Aatrey

Talking about his own e-commerce portal Meesho, Aatrey said the company’s current valuation stands at $5 billion. He added, “We have 14 crore people who buy from Meesho every year. In the past one year we did about 1 billion (100 crore) orders”.

Vidit Aatrey grew up in Rohini, Delhi. “I was the first engineer in my entire family while most of my cousins still do farming. When I was growing up My dad always told me that there are only two kinds of professions–one who does government jobs and another who sits at Kirana stores (grocery store). I studied at IIT Delhi and I realised there are a lot more other things to do. After college, I went to ITC in Chennai. I went to a factory and there everyone used to speak only Tamil. Then there used to be a morning standup meeting for about an hour and only in Tamil. After two years I moved to Bengaluru and like everyone, I got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. We started Meesho in 2015. We did this cz we realize that e-commerce is coming up. We realized that small businesses in India at that time were offline. Now we have close to 140 million consumers and 1 million small businesses”.

Separately, Meesho laid off laid off 251 employees constituting 15% of its workforce last week to cut costs and as part of its efforts to achieve profitability.

Meesho Founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey in an email to employees informed about the decision and announced that all the affected employees will get one month extra severance pay beyond the notice period as well as ESOPs irrespective of the period they have been with the company.

“We are reducing the size of the Meesho workforce by 15%, affecting 251 employees,” Aatrey said in an internal email.

He said that the company grew 10 times from 2020 to 2022 which was aided by Covid tailwinds and aggressive investments.

“Even as we tracked our plans, the macro climate undeniably and considerably changed. As a result, we have had to accelerate our timeline to profitability as part of Project Redbull, while readjusting our GMV growth goals to 30%  YoY.

“While our cash reserves buffer us well for these harsh circumstances, we need to stay highly prudent on the cost front,” Aatrey said.

A recent report by Jefferies had said that Meesho is already contribution-margin positive (pre-marketing and indirect spends) and the company is nearing zero cash burn and is on track to achieve EBITDA breakeven this year.