Meesho raises $50 million in Series C round from Shunwei Capital, DST and others

Meesho plans to use the fresh funds to build a stronger product and expand its technology team.
Meesho raises $50 million in Series C round from Shunwei Capital, DST and others
Meesho raises $50 million in Series C round from Shunwei Capital, DST and others
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E-commerce platform, Meesho has raised $50 million, as part of its Series C funding round from Shunwei Capital, DST Partners and RPS Ventures. Existing investors, Sequoia India, SAIF Partners, Venture Highway and Y Combinator have also participated in this round. This comes 5 months after Meesho raised its last tranche of funds. The current round makes the total funds raised by the firm to $65 Million.

Meesho hosts products mostly from small traders, housewives and so on and there are resellers on Meesho who help them sell their products. Art and craft, fashion wear, home and kitchen products form a major part of the stuff sold on the Meesho platform and there’s a move to now add personal care nutrition products among other new items to be added to the offerings.

The company told Mint that it hopes to use the funds now raised towards strengthening the product portfolio while adding to the staffing in the technical areas. One of their plans involves adding products imported from particularly China. Being a social marketing model, the customer base also used to be limited with homemakers and students but is now witnessing a horizontal expansion to include many other sections of the community. The result is the turnover on the Meesho platform has registered 100 times jump in one year.

Meesho also has plans to go vernacular to make inroads into the tier II and tier III cities and towns. Already a third of the population on its platform is not so comfortable in dealing in English. There is an online chat facility which helps the resellers as well as buyers in connecting with each other.

The main USP that Meesho employs is creating an extra income stream for the middle-class housewives and others interested in home-based activities. They become resellers on the site and earn a decent income. In percentage terms, these resellers get to gain around 10-20% on every concluded sale. They don’t have to worry about the delivery and logistics since that gets taken care of by Meesho.

Meesho is not the only one in the social media marketing service model for promoting ecommerce. There are others like Shop101, Glowroad and Ezmall. 

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