It’s hard to hazard a guess on which has been faster – the speed at which you get almost anything delivered to your doorstep or the pace at which quick commerce stormed the online retail space.
Although the wave of 10-minute deliveries has swept through the ecosystem, Meesho seems to have remained largely unfazed, adding to its distinctiveness. The ecommerce major was the first to stop charging commissions to sellers, build an asset-light, in-house delivery model, set up a reselling network, and became India’s first horizontal ecommerce venture to list on the stock exchanges.
The early days of 2025 saw Meesho indicating that it was structurally prepared for the public market, with tighter governance, stronger contribution margins, lower logistic costs, and higher category-level profitability.
Meesho’s blockbuster IPO was oversubscribed 79.03 times and the shares were listed at a 46.4% premium on the exchanges. Meesho went on to raise INR 5,421 Cr at a valuation of more than INR 50,000 Cr with the proceeds majorly to be deployed across the company’s operations, technological advancements and expansion.
Meesho doubled down on its core – affordable fashion, lifestyle, beauty, and household essentials – supported by a fast-growing seller base from Tier II to VI cities. With Valmo, its full-stack logistical backbone, it brought both predictability and pricing control to its supply chain. As a result, logistics efficiency improved, returns reduced, and cost-per-shipment fell meaningfully.
At the same time, Meesho quietly began investing in AI-driven operational and platform intelligence, leveraging its massive repository of users, sellers, and transaction data.
By all means, 2025 was a defining year for Meesho, setting its trajectory as a publicly listed company and building the skin as a leading ecommerce platform in India.
In a pre-listing conversation, CEO Vidit Aatrey told Inc42 that the company’s playbook was primarily woven around value commerce or affordability-driven shopping and it would remain the core of Meesho’s business model.
Aatrey had asserted that there was no loss of market share for the company from the rise of quick commerce, even as nearly 30 Mn of its over 230 Mn annual transacting customers come from the top eight cities in India, where the 10-minute delivery format is most active.
The discussion with the chief executive in the run-up to the public listing indicated three major management decisions that played behind Meesho’s success. As 2025 winds up as a year of great success for the ecommerce giant, Inc42 takes an inside view into Meesho’s public listing narrative and what helped it win the investor confidence.
In 2025, Meesho doubled down on its strength in scaling the order volumes processed on the platform, but the average ticket size of the cart fell by a few rupees. Both CEO Aatrey and CFO Dhiresh Bansal had earlier told Inc42 that a falling average order value (AOV) was not a cause for concern since the ecommerce firm had the edge in volumes.
Meesho processed 230 Cr orders in the 12 months ended in September 2025. In fact, it ruled the volume game with 37% of the overall ecommerce orders in its control in the first nine months of FY25. This is what Meesho is betting on to outpace not just Amazon and Flipkart, even the likes of Blinkit, Instamart and Zepto, as the quick commerce trip firms up non-grocery deliveries.
This restraint proved strategic. Quick commerce is capital-intensive, dependent on high-frequency behaviour from a small segment of affluent users. For Meesho’s core audience – value-conscious shoppers in Tier II to VI cities – the proposition simply did not align with spending patterns.
The other facet that Meesho seems to be focussed on is maintaining the financial discipline even as it pivoted multiple times from being a pure-play fashion marketplace to a social commerce engine to ecommerce platform and now to content commerce venture.
The basis, as Aatrey said, lies in innovating each of these models at a small scale without much budget allocation and then taking a neutral approach for further expansion or even shutting down any business vertical.
Throughout the journey, what remained a priority for Meesho is maintaining a healthy cash flow within the company with careful execution of product iteration. In FY25, Meesho generated about INR 1,000 Cr in free cash flow with financial discipline being a key measure.
A major driver of Meesho’s 2025 performance – and its IPO readiness – has been Valmo, the company’s in-house logistics arm.
Created in early 2024 to plug reliability gaps in third-party services and to improve experience in low-AOV shipments, Valmo grew into one of Meesho’s most formidable strategic advantages.
Essentially a platform to aggregate the existing small logistics players with their infrastructure, Valmo has expanded rapidly across India, giving Meesho deep penetration into Tier II to VI towns where ecommerce logistics is usually inconsistent. This shift dramatically reduced Meesho’s dependence on partners like Ecom Express.
By 2025, Valmo emerged as a cornerstone of its 2025 muscle-building, offering a competitive edge through an asset-light model that bypassed warehouses and heavy infrastructure. By leveraging a tech platform to aggregate 6,000 hyperlocal partners across 15,000 postal codes, Valmo optimized fulfillments without ownership, slashing fixed costs and enabling scalability.
The Meesho CEO described Valmo as an Uber-like approach where the tech platform doesn’t own any cars but has created an asset that improves the cost utilisation, gives better returns to drivers and creates low-cost cab service acess.
One of the contributing factors to Valmo handling an unprecedented scale of orders at Meesho is a strong tech backend and a product and tech team comprising over 1000 employees.
Meesho’s strong tech team delivered its first in-house LLM model, Bharat GeoIndia LLM, to convert India’s vague addresses in deeper tier II and III markets into precise locations for efficient logistics operations and minimising return costs.
Meesho bound more than 15 Mn sellers with 198.77 Mn users to drive home 1,834.40 Mn transactions in FY25 alone. It achieved clarity in understanding the behavioural patterns of its price-conscious users and built one of the richest commerce datasets in India.
The company leveraged this to build internal AI models that enhanced search relevance, improved product recommendations, accelerated fraud detection, optimised logistics routing, and automated seller support processes.
“Around 57% of our entire headcount is in tech and product, which is also very unique. You will not find many other companies that way. So, we tend to invest more in technology, less on on-ground operations. And because of that core competency in technology, we’ve been able to make that platform work at scale.”
Meesho has, to a large extent, also overcome challenges from the end-consumer experience point of view when it came to refunds / order cancellations which it faced in 2022 and 2023. “I think we now have quite sophisticated quality systems. Every seller comes on board, we maintain their reputation profile, basis, the early orders they get, ratings, reviews, return profile, we decide which seller scales on the platform, which seller goes down,” he said.
Meesho’s huge count of active users gives it a unique advantage of using its AI/ ML stack to understand the customer preference and direct the same towards the sellers for right demand supply matching.
Meesho maintained a tight fiscal control in FY25, even as its losses spiralled to INR 3,942 Cr due to one-time cost of reverse flipping from the US to India, which reportedly cost the company a whopping INR 2,324 in taxes.
Save for this setback, the company appeared to inch towards breakeven with the FY25 topline soaring to INR 9,390 Cr.
Rivals Amazon and Flipkart were also reportedly focussed on reducing losses in FY25 through cost control and diversification, both were compelled to pivot aggressively into quick commerce in 2025 as 10-minute delivery platforms like Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart eroded their dominance in high-frequency categories such as groceries, essentials, and impulse buys.
Flipkart launched Minutes in late 2024, expanding to 800 dark stores in months. Amazon toed the line, rolling out Now (Tez) in mid-2025, targeting 300 micro-fulfillment centres likely investing over $1 Bn to chase scale in a sector that stays the course to reach $35 Bn by 2030.
In terms of revenue, Amazon India marketplace operated on a much higher base reporting INR 30,149 Cr revenue in FY25 as against a loss of INR 3,74 Cr a significant 89% YOY reduction in losses. Flipkart’s marketplace business reported a topline of INR 20,493 Cr in FY25 as against the losses of INR 1,494 Cr.
There seemed to be an early impact of quick commerce eating into the income growth for both Amazon and Flipkart, while Meesho maintained that it did not lose a single consumer to 10-minute delivery platforms. In fact, a CLSA report maintained that the ecommerce market share for Meesho grew to 9% in 2024, while for Flipkart and Amazon, it fell from 33.27% to 32% and 30.5% to 28%.
Meesho’s value-focussed model seems immune to speed wars. By sidestepping capital-intensive dark stores and stressing on affordability in unbranded, low-AOV categories, the startup protected its margins and deepened penetration in Tier II-IV markets, where quick commerce penetration remained low.
But, capital is a cause for concern. Amazon and Flipkart – both with deep pockets and robust international backing – are wary of the increasingly competitive ecommerce landscape, especially with the arrival of the 10-minute brigade.
Amazon recently announced a $35 Bn investment projection for India to ramp up all its business verticals, the core ecommerce business will likely be a key beneficiary of this with strategic focus on enhancing its massive logistics capabilities. Flipkart, on the other hand, is likely to list on the stock exchanges in what could be one of the largest public issues in India in 2026 even as Walmart continues to remain a key stakeholder.
On its part, Meesho has to build on the confidence it earned from the public markets in 2025 with its blockbuster IPO and strike a balance between its tech-first innovation and costs to reach its profitability milestone in 2026.