Meesho Plans To Go Public In 12-24 Months: Vidit Aatrey The founder and CEO of Meesho said it is just a matter of choice to choose between growth and profitability

Meesho, an Internet commerce Unicorn, plans to go public in the next 12-24 months, as per a statement given by Vidit Aatrey.

"In the next one to two years, we would be cashflow positive, which means we would be adding more and more money in the bank. We have always been unit economics positive, which means since we started the company back in 2015 to today, every single month we made some money product. So, there always had a positive unit economics. It is just a matter of choice for us to choose between the growth and profitability," said Vidit Aatrey, founder and CEO, Meesho, in an interview with Business Today.

"We don't want to invest so much in growth, we can really get close to profitability which can happen in the next one or two years. A lot of things that we are doing right now is scaling revenue in that direction. We are very confident that we can get there in the next 12 to 24 months," Aatrey further added.

As per recent reports, almost half of all the transactions on the e-commerce marketplace, Meesho, in the calendar year 2021 came from users who were new to the Internet. Out of this, 20 per cent were trying out online shopping for the first time ever.

Utkrishta Kumar, CXO for business operations, Meesho, in a news report was quoted as saying, "Online shoppers from non-metro cities demonstrate a distinct buying pattern and choices when compared to metro cities. Hence the platform has been focusing on adding new internet users as a unique strategy to drive up its order volumes."

According to industry estimates, out of the 600 million Internet users in India, only 70 million to 80 million of them shop online on e-commerce and other online platforms.

Stating the level of penetration Meesho has reached, Aatrey said, "We have just started. So, if you look at the total number of small businesses in India across all its categories is about 60 to 70 million. If you look at our platform today, we have close to half a million of these small businesses. So, we still have got a very small percentage of the small business economy online."

Founded in 2015 by Sanjeev Barnwal and Vidit Aatrey, Meesho initially started off as social commerce model platform that employed millions of resellers, out of which 80 per cent are women. It claims to have 44 million active product listings on its market place.

As per a study conducted by data intelligence company Bobble AI, India's e-commerce business grew by 77 per cent between 2020 and 2021 with transactions from tier II and tier III cities, higher than ever.