From a start-up founded by two 24-year-olds in 2015, Meesho has become one of India’s leading e-commerce marketplace. Its mission of enabling anyone in India to start their own business with zero investment has empowered entrepreneurs and led to approximately 250 million annual transacting users.1 Meesho went public in 2025, with shares jumping 60 percent after its $603 million IPO.
In this Leading Asia interview, Vidit Aatrey, CEO and cofounder of Meesho, talks to McKinsey senior partner Sathya Prathipati about the difficulties of building an online shopping platform in a country as fragmented as India. He elaborates on how he and co-founder Sanjeev Barnwal built the company into a tech retail powerhouse that is affordable and easy to use.
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Sathya Prathipati: Take us back to navigating those early preproduct, market-fit days. Was it difficult to craft Meesho’s mission? And, if so, what stopped you from taking a regular corporate job?
Vidit Aatrey: Sanjeev grew up in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, and I was born in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. In 2015, Bangalore tech circles thought e-commerce was done, but in our hometowns, nobody was trading online. So, we started with a simple mission to bring everyone in India online.
I would have shut down the company soon if I’d started it with anyone other than my college roommate Sanjeev. In 2015, he called me from Tokyo, bored of corporate life. I said, “Let’s build something together.” He resigned the next day.
Innovation is never linear and we knew most startups fail. So, we made a pact to take the option of shutting down off the table for the first two years. That period was a journey of trial and error. We were 24-year-olds who had never run a company, failing every day. But that taught us patience and we motivated each other. I see founders without that deep trust blaming each other when chaos creeps in. For us, trust was the survival mechanism.
Our first big insight was pre-Jio, when mobile data was expensive and people avoided shopping apps that consumed data.2 Since WhatsApp was the only app they already had that didn’t auto-download images, we built a model allowing consumers to buy directly through WhatsApp. At its peak in 2020, we had ten million WhatsApp groups operating across India. Then we solved the seller equation by introducing zero commission—a first in India—and over a million active sellers joined us.
We applied the same approach to logistics by building a technology layer over underutilized local logistics assets. It brought costs down and made online shopping affordable for the mass-market.
Sathya Prathipati: India is famously not one market, but Meesho serves hundreds of millions of customers. How do you scale across a market as fragmented as rural and semi-urban India?
Vidit Aatrey: The top ten or 12 cities in India are fairly homogeneous, but beyond them, the country becomes very heterogeneous. For context, when we mapped regional festivals to design sales events, we expected 50 or 60, but found 460 major local celebrations. So, for example, if you only run a Diwali sale, millions of customers feel like you don’t care about their culture.
That’s why Meesho doesn’t hold inventory or launch private labels. You cannot build a single private label for a billion diverse people, but you can build a platform that connects local businesses to local buyers and design strictly for two universal common denominators, namely affordability and simplicity.
Affordability involves balancing India’s limited incomes with its massive aspirations. We solve this by keeping prices incredibly low, removing traditional friction by offering zero commission to sellers, and engineering hyper-efficient logistics.
The second is simplicity, because a vast portion of the population still navigates a steep digital learning curve. We built Meesho the same way. When a user opens our app, they just swipe, and AI recommends what they want.
Sathya Prathipati: What was the biggest “bet the house” decision you made, and how do you think about unmodelable risks?
Vidit Aatrey: In 2021, we faced an existential crisis. We were a B2B2C company built on WhatsApp resellers, but when Jio democratized data and the [COVID-19] pandemic hit, consumers rapidly shifted to direct shopping apps. We had just raised capital around the old model, but it was clear we had to change.
We shut down a business growing fivefold year-over-year to build a new one.
Most competitors never made that transition. In July, 2021, we launched the Meesho app, which quickly became the top app on the [Google] Play Store.
That high-stakes pivot solidified how I categorize corporate decision-making. First, there are those with a modelable ROI—involving moves you can accurately estimate, frame, and decentralize. I don’t get involved in those. Then there are decisions with an unmodelable ROI, where you cannot calculate a financial return. The fatal mistake is judging long-term, unmodelable decisions by today’s metrics. Rather, my framework is to live in 2030, asking myself: Will I regret not doing this? If the answer is yes, we execute.
The post-pandemic correction forced us to pivot rapidly from growth-at-all-cost to profitability to prepare for public markets. It required difficult decisions, including our only company layoff.
We survived the initial shock of the pandemic, when our revenue dropped to zero for three months during lockdowns. Yet, while the post-pandemic correction and COVID shocks were severe corporate hurdles, they weren’t existential. Everything after 2017 was about navigating scale; before 2017, every single day was a battle for survival.
Shapers and Founders
Sathya Prathipati: How do you remain competitive against global commerce giants when your original tech thesis—expensive data and WhatsApp—evaporates?
Vidit Aatrey: We have a unique advantage. Most others look at this market dispassionately, focusing on GMV [gross merchandise value], profit and loss, and higher-income urban customers. We stay focused on the next billion users and how to figure things out before anyone else. Our teams spend extensive time on the ground discovering user problems. Our culture is hard to replicate: Difficult problems require focus, passion, and staying power.
Sathya Prathipati: What does it take for an Indian company to scale globally? I know you’re still early in that journey, but much of Meesho’s success comes from a deep understanding of the Indian consumer.
Vidit Aatrey: I think a lot of what I’ve said still applies. First, appreciating diversity and being as local as possible are strengths for building a global company. You learn not to assume every customer is the same. Building in India teaches you that very early on. The other advantage is cost structure. If you can make the economics work in India, it’s easier to make them work in countries with much higher per-capita income. Going up is easier than coming down. That said, this is still theoretical as we haven’t gone global yet.
Over the long term, I believe every company should make its country more competitive. Today, we make logistics more efficient, work with manufacturers to improve quality and scale, and use our data to build better products. As those value chains become more efficient, India becomes more competitive and our aspiration is for India to build that same manufacturing competitiveness and eventually take Indian products to the world efficiently.
Sathya Prathipati: With Meesho’s IPO behind you, what can the business do that it couldn’t do as a private company? And where does AI fit into this next chapter?
Vidit Aatrey: Two years ago, we were focused on listing and maintaining a predictable, profitability-driven profile. We couldn’t easily take an unconstrained, long-term view. Today, we can. [After the IPO] I immediately announced a five-year planning exercise to imagine and fund bold, mission-aligned ideas.
AI is part of that frontier, but technology constantly shifts. If you’re building a tech business, you have to chase the frontier or you get left behind.
Sathya Prathipati: As AI changes how companies operate, what remains core to the CEO’s role, and has AI changed your operating model?
Vidit Aatrey: I don’t think the CEO’s core responsibilities change, namely, setting direction, hiring great people, building the team. AI makes you dramatically better at doing these.
For me, setting direction starts with being present on the ground. For example, I recently spent time in Bihar, at what I call the consumer frontier; places where people are beginning to buy online. There you can understand what’s working or not, and what capabilities you need to build over the next few years. This used to take me six to 12 months to do, but I can now do it much faster.
AI has also changed the responsibility of leadership development. All my meetings are now transcribed, so when giving feedback to someone, I no longer have to rely on my memory of what happened. I can look across every interaction and be much more specific and consistent, because the transcript remembers it for me. We call this the universal context layer.
When I was in the United States recently, I kept hearing that AI agents are only as good as the context you give them. It convinced us that context is everything so that knowledge doesn’t stay locked in someone’s head. As agents get better, they’ll be able to use that shared context to create much more value.
Sathya Prathipati: You’ve spoken about building companies that strengthen India’s competitiveness. Do you believe global technology champions will emerge in India, and what role can Bangalore play?
Vidit Aatrey: I do, and I think it’s just a matter of time. Bangalore’s biggest contribution has been making sure every major technology wave reaches India. Whenever a new technology emerges, China and the United States race ahead. People wonder whether India has been left behind. Then founders in Bangalore start experimenting, whether at the application layer, the model layer, or somewhere else.
They’ve been underestimated, but they can help India catch up. You already find companies in Bangalore building drones, humanoid robots, and other frontier technologies. What’s remarkable is that Bangalore does this without the advantages China and the United States have. That’s why I’m optimistic.
If you look at China, for example, multinational technology companies first became national champions by building massive domestic businesses. That created an ecosystem and the confidence to expand globally. I think India will follow a similar path. You need companies with the scale, balance sheets, and confidence to take risks that have no precedent.
Bangalore has already produced global champions in IT services, and the ISRO [Indian Space Research Organisation] is here. If the next generation of global technology companies emerges from India, I think it’ll happen in Bangalore.
Sathya Prathipati: It may be too early to talk about legacy, but do you think about what you want to leave behind over the next 30 or 40 years?
Vidit Aatrey: Honestly, not at all. I’m 35 and there are many things I still want to build. I’m much more excited by questions like, how do we make India more competitive? How do we take that competitiveness to the world?
For me, the IPO wasn’t the milestone. It was a necessary step but it is not what gives me energy. What excites me are business milestones: adopting a new technology, solving a hard problem, reaching the next 100 million customers. There’s still a lot left to do.
