It’s hard to hazard a guess on which has been faster – the speed at which you get almost anything delivered to your doorstep or the pace at which quick commerce stormed the online retail space.

Although the wave of 10-minute deliveries has swept through the ecosystem, Meesho seems to have remained largely unfazed, adding to its distinctiveness. The ecommerce major was the first to stop charging commissions to sellers, build an asset-light, in-house delivery model, set up a reselling network, and became India’s first horizontal ecommerce venture to list on the stock exchanges.

The early days of 2025 saw Meesho indicating that it was structurally prepared for the public market, with tighter governance, stronger contribution margins, lower logistic costs, and higher category-level profitability.

All this set the stage for an IPO that didn’t just succeed, but became one of the year’s most successful listings in India’s tech ecosystem. None of the major investors like SoftBank that owns 10% and Prosus with 12% sold their stakes, rather some of the earliest investors like Elevation Capital and PeakXV Partners raked in exponential returns from the public issue.

Meesho’s blockbuster IPO was oversubscribed 79.03 times and the shares were listed at a 46.4% premium on the exchanges. Meesho went on to raise INR 5,421 Cr at a valuation of more than INR 50,000 Cr with the proceeds majorly to be deployed across the company’s operations, technological advancements and expansion.

Much of this turnaround was rooted in a deliberate operating philosophy: build scale in a disciplined manner, stay close to low-income and mid-income value shoppers, and refuse to stray into flashy high-burn categories like quick commerce.

Meesho doubled down on its core – affordable fashion, lifestyle, beauty, and household essentials – supported by a fast-growing seller base from Tier II to VI cities. With Valmo, its full-stack logistical backbone, it brought both predictability and pricing control to its supply chain. As a result, logistics efficiency improved, returns reduced, and cost-per-shipment fell meaningfully.

At the same time, Meesho quietly began investing in AI-driven operational and platform intelligence, leveraging its massive repository of users, sellers, and transaction data.

By all means, 2025 was a defining year for Meesho, setting its trajectory as a publicly listed company and building the skin as a leading ecommerce platform in India.

In a pre-listing conversation, CEO Vidit Aatrey told Inc42 that the company’s playbook was primarily woven around value commerce or affordability-driven shopping and it would remain the core of Meesho’s business model.

Aatrey had asserted that there was no loss of market share for the company from the rise of quick commerce, even as nearly 30 Mn of its over 230 Mn annual transacting customers come from the top eight cities in India, where the 10-minute delivery format is most active.

The discussion with the chief executive in the run-up to the public listing indicated three major management decisions that played behind Meesho’s success. As 2025 winds up as a year of great success for the ecommerce giant, Inc42 takes an inside view into Meesho’s public listing narrative and what helped it win the investor confidence.

Play Volume Game, Keep Off QCom

In 2025, Meesho doubled down on its strength in........

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