Co-founder and CEO of Meesho Vidit Aatrey has had a remarkable rise from a budding businessman to a significant participant in India's e-commerce sector. According to StartupInsider, Aatrey's accomplishments have been recognised with significant honors like inclusion in Forbes' 30 Under 30 in 2018.
Nirmala Sitharaman, the Minister of Finance, also presented him with the MSNBC award for the Young Turk Startup of the Year for 2020. In 2021, Fortune named him one of the 40 Under 40.
Vidit Aatrey comes from a middle-class family. His father, Ravi Datt Sharma, worked for the Delhi Jal Board, and the family resided in a government-quarter-style two-bedroom apartment in Delhi.
His father supported Vidit Aatrey in his goal of becoming an IAS officer, and he had intended to take the UPSC exam.
Vidit Aatrey got a high-paying job with ITC after graduating from IIT. After working in Chennai, Vidit Aatrey relocated to Bengaluru, where he made the decision to launch his own company.
But after studying in IIT, Aatrey realised he wasn't cut out for a job in the government sector, so he began looking for business ideas, and that's how Meesho was born.
Aatrey and his co-founder Sanjeev Barnwal introduced Meesho in 2015, a social commerce platform made to enable individuals and small businesses to launch their online businesses using social media networks.
Meesho works on a distinctive approach where the "seller" has the opportunity to create a marketplace on the app. They connect their Meesho accounts to their Facebook sites, communicate with consumers via WhatsApp, and Meesho handles delivery while collecting a commission fee from the merchants. Meesho takes care of delivery and monetizes by charging sellers a commission.
In 2021, Meesho raised more than USD 870 million in two tranches from Fidelity, SoftBank, and B Capital. In September 2021, Meesho had a USD 4.9 billion market value.
