Meesho, the Indian e-commerce rival to Amazon and Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart, plans to launch a roughly $606 million IPO that will feature token sales by early backers and zero sales from major companies such as SoftBank and Prosus, demonstrating investors’ confidence in India’s burgeoning online retail market as tech shareholders around the world cash in on listings.
The 10-year-old startup plans to price its shares at 105 to 111 rupees per share, raising 42.5 billion rupees (approximately $475 million) in new capital and the remaining small amount through secondary sales, giving Meesho a post-issue valuation of approximately 501 billion rupees (approximately $5.6 billion). The startup was last valued at about $5 billion on the private market in 2021.
Meesho is set to become India’s first major horizontal e-commerce platform to go public, rival Flipkart is expected to aim for an IPO next year, and Amazon is reportedly considering a possible spin-off of its India operations and could go public in the future.
According to the prospectus (PDF), some of Meesho’s early shareholders sold in the IPO, with Elevation Capital selling just over 4% of its shares, Sequoia Capital spinoff Peak XV Partners selling about 3%, and Y Combinator selling about 14%. Large backers such as SoftBank, Prosus and Fidelity have not sold their stakes.
Meesho’s offering was reduced by about 40% from a draft prospectus filed in October to 105.5 million shares worth 11.7 billion rupees (about $131 million) at the high end of the price range. However, co-founders Vidit Eitley and Sanjeev Kumar have sold more than they had planned in their draft prospectus, increasing their total offering to 32 million shares from about 23.5 million initially, helping to offset reduced participation from other shareholders.
Founded in 2015, Meesho started as a social commerce platform targeting users who shopped online for the first time through WhatsApp before evolving into a full-fledged marketplace. Since then, the company has carved out a fast-growing niche with a low-cost model tailored to price-sensitive Indian consumers and small sellers, an approach that is increasingly putting pressure on larger rivals Amazon and Flipkart. The Bangalore-based company operates on a commission-lite model, earning revenue primarily from logistics fees, advertising and other services, while charging commissions on products sold through its separate Meesho Mall channel.
According to Meesho’s prospectus, it reported operating revenue of 55.78 billion rupees (about $624 million) for the six months ended September 30, up from 43.11 billion rupees (about $482 million) in the same period last year. Net merchandise value increased 44% year-on-year to 191.94 billion rupees (approximately $2.15 billion). But losses widened, with Meesho posting a pre-tax loss of 4.33 billion rupees (about $48.4 million) in the September half of 2025, compared with 240 million rupees (about $2.7 million) in the same period last year.
In the past 12 months, Meesho recorded 234.2 million transactional users, or unique consumers who purchased at least one product on the platform. During the same period, the company had 706,471 annual sellers. This is defined as a seller who receives at least one order in a year.
Meesho also uses a vast network of creators for product discovery, with over 50,000 active content creators generating at least one order through their content in the past year.
“Many Indians are just experiencing e-commerce for the first time on Meesho, but like the rest of us, they will be buying more and more things on this platform over the next 10 years, and more often,” Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director at Peak XV Partners, told TechCrunch. “That’s why long-term beliefs are why we continue to hold as many shares as we can.”
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Meesho positions itself as a value-driven platform, unlike Amazon and Flipkart, which see themselves as convenience-driven players. In this regard, the company compares itself to other value-driven marketplaces such as Pinduoduo in China, Shopee in Southeast Asia, and Mercado Libre in Latin America.
“If you look at the value-oriented bucket, here we are trying to appeal to mass-market consumers who sell all kinds of products and categories in a marketplace business model that tends to be asset-light,” Atley told reporters at a Meesho press conference on Friday. “And the reason people come back is because they want access to more options with affordable value propositions.”
Meesho also believes the IPO will improve its ability to attract talent and strengthen trust across the broader ecosystem, CFO Dhiresh Bansal told TechCrunch. He said the listing would enhance the company’s brand with job seekers, including those from large tech companies, and strengthen Meesho’s governance standards, which would have a positive ripple effect for consumers, distributors and logistics partners.
The IPO will open for public offering on December 3rd, and the anchor book will be published on December 2nd. Approximately 75% of the offering will be reserved for qualified institutional investors, 10% for retail investors and 15% for non-institutional investors.
SoftBank did not respond to a request for comment.
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