E-commerce platfrom Meesho on Monday said that it has received an investment of $125 million in its latest funding round led by South Africa-based global consumer internet group Naspers.
The other participants in the funding round were Facebook and existing investors SAIF, Sequoia, Shunwei Capital, RPS and Venture Highway, the company said in a statement. Former Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin also participated in the round.
Meesho is a social commerce online marketplace in India that enables independent resellers to build small businesses by connecting them with suppliers.
The company also provides logistics and payment tools on the platform. These sellers then sell within their social networks on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
"The new funds will enable strides towards this goal by allowing the company to make deeper inroads in areas outside India's major metro regions, by creating more entrepreneurs, and as a result reaching remote customers not serviced by traditional e-commerce marketplaces," it said.
Meesho also plans to use the new funds to further build its technology platform to accommodate new product lines, and to evolve its analytics and machine learning platforms to handle national scale. At the same time, in addition to expanding its network coverage to new geographies, the company will further deepen its operations in existing geographies.
In June, Facebook made an investment in Meesho, which the company said at the time that it would help them further their efforts to enable independent entrepreneurs to build businesses and grow their customer base via social channels.
As of June, Meesho had a community of more than 15,000 suppliers and 2,000,000 resellers throughout India.