Meesho founder Vidit Aatrey now leads a company worth Rs 95,000 crore, a far cry from the government career his family once envisioned for him.
His path from IIT Delhi to startup prominence involved multiple abandoned business models before one finally clicked.
Aatrey earned his electrical engineering degree from IIT Delhi in 2012. Growing up with parents employed in government service, he faced expectations to pursue something stable, perhaps the civil services. Yet his campus years exposed him to India’s emerging startup scene and entirely different career possibilities.
After graduating, he worked at ITC and InMobi. Those roles taught him how companies function and how technology could address everyday problems. The secure trajectory his family preferred began fading from view.
## Early experiments that flopped
Aatrey and co-founder Sanjeev Kumar first built Fashnear, a platform for hyperlocal fashion delivery. The concept fell flat. Customers cared less about delivery speed and more about having many options to browse.
The duo pivoted to a new model helping sellers build online storefronts. That version also failed to reach meaningful scale.
Rather than quit, the founders started visiting markets in Surat, Jaipur, and Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. They spent hours observing how small merchants actually operated.
## Watching WhatsApp sellers changed everything
They spotted something telling: women were already running informal businesses on WhatsApp. These sellers bought from suppliers, showed products to customers through personal contacts, and managed transactions manually.
WhatsApp lacked the infrastructure for running a full business. Payments, order tracking, logistics, and customer support all happened outside the app.
So Aatrey and Kumar built Meesho Supply. This managed marketplace connected suppliers with individuals selling through their social circles. Orders grew quickly. The company adopted the name Meesho, drawn from “Meri Shop.”
The pitch was straightforward: give small sellers, especially women, digital storefronts without requiring them to build technology themselves.
Their willingness to iterate helped them land a spot in Y Combinator. Their application highlighted the problem they wanted to solve for Indian women entrepreneurs, not a polished pitch deck.
## What failure taught them
Meesho’s origin story is defined by experimentation. Two business models failed before careful observation of seller behavior unlocked a scalable idea.
That approach eventually carried Meesho beyond social commerce into broader e-commerce. By late 2024, the platform counted nearly 190 million users and about 400,000 sellers. Revenue climbed 26 percent to Rs 9,900 crore in FY25, according to Moneycontrol.
The company went public in December 2025, raising Rs 4,250 crore through a fresh issue plus an offer for sale of roughly Rs 1,171 crore. Shares listed on the NSE and BSE on December 10, 2025. By August 20, 2026, the stock traded near Rs 205, pushing market capitalization to about Rs 95,000 crore.
Aatrey’s trajectory from IIT Delhi to civil services consideration to e-commerce leadership reveals something important: unconventional choices, repeated failures, and close attention to user habits can produce extraordinary outcomes.
