In June 2017, Vidit Aatrey sat in a restaurant in Bengaluru with an investor, Mukul Arora of Elevation Capital. Meesho had two months of runway left. He had been meeting investors for months without success. And he had a choice that evening: meet another investor who seemed more likely to convert, or meet Arora, who had been talking to him for more than a year. He cancelled the other meeting.
He recalled later that he had chosen on the basis of who had gone deepest: "I don't remember any other fund that went so deep in speaking to our resellers, speaking to our users." His words to Arora were, "So if I could get one person, I really wanted to be you."
Aatrey comes from a farming family in Uttar Pradesh, sugarcane farmers, Outlook Business reports, with Hapur named as the family's place.
Aatrey comes from a farming family in Uttar Pradesh, sugarcane farmers, Outlook Business reports, with Hapur named as the family's place. His father is a quality control officer at the Delhi Jal Board and wanted him to become an IAS officer. His mother warmed to his entrepreneurship before his father did. His father disagreed for a long time and came round after seeing his son in the news. He studied at IIT Delhi, then worked as a management trainee in ITC's packaging unit in Chennai and at InMobi from 2014.
His first company, Fashnear, was a hyperlocal fashion marketplace. It did not work. A later attempt to help small businesses open online shops also failed to gain traction. Then he and his co-founder Sanjeev Barnwal, both from middle-class families that had bought from small businesses all their lives, noticed people selling on WhatsApp. "Nobody, anywhere else in the world, was selling products on WhatsApp," he said. Meesho began in December 2015.
Investors were not convinced. YourStory's headline captured their first reaction: the model sounded like a marketing gimmick. Aatrey said the company spent more than a year raising its Series A.
The hard times did not stop there. When the pandemic hit and non-essential sales were banned, Aatrey remembered that "for three months, essentially, you could not sell anything on the platform." In 2023 Meesho had to delist 42 lakh counterfeit listings, and in 2024 it blocked 22 million suspicious transactions.
It listed on 10 December 2025 at about Rs 161 against an issue price of Rs 111, in an issue of Rs 5,421 crore. For FY26 the company reported revenue of Rs 13,099 crore and a net loss of Rs 1,358 crore.
What won Meesho its first big cheque was one investor spending a year talking to resellers and users while others judged the idea from a distance. Founders can take that as a rule for picking investors too.