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Meesho, which became India’s first social commerce unicorn in April after raising a $300 million round from SoftBank, has climbed to the top of app charts.

It ranked #1 across categories on Google Play Store India, going past usual suspects like Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook, and other social media apps. Meesho (which stands for ‘Meri Shop’) has crossed over 50 million downloads on Android.

The Facebook-backed startup has grown phenomenally in the last year as the pandemic forced more people to stay home and order online. It crossed monthly orders of 20 million in March 2021, up over 6X from three million in March 2020.

Meesho Co-founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey said in a tweet,

“Today, Meesho has 13M+ women entrepreneurs who have sold products to ~50M consumers (3 percent of India’s population) from 100K+ suppliers, across 4,800+ cities/towns. Our monthly transacting entrepreneurs have grown 10X over last 12 months.”

Its target is to simplify ecommerce for 100 million small businesses (including individual ones run by homepreneurs) in India and help them earn a better income.

The Bengaluru-based startup’s valuation jumped from $700 million in 2019 to $2.1 billion in 2021 after its last fund-raise in April.

Besides SoftBank, the round also saw participation from Meesho’s existing investors, including Prosus Ventures, Facebook, Shunwei Capital, Venture Highway, and Knollwood Investment.

Aviral Bhatnagar, a VC at Venture Highway, tweeted about Meesho’s new app ranking.

The platform offers incentives, coupons, and first purchase offers to resellers, besides providing competitive wholesale prices for shoppers.

Meesho lists over 50 lakh products across 650+ categories, including fashion and accessories, home and kitchen essentials, beauty and health essentials, and so on.

It competes with the likes of DealShare, Glowroad, Shop101, Mall91, Bulbul, and others, in the rapidly growing social commerce space.

A 2019 PayPal report stated that India is among the leading Asian markets for social commerce. The vertical is projected to be worth $100 billion by 2025. 

What is Meesho’s secret sauce in this hyper-competitive space?

“Exceptional talent coupled with high autonomy and a tech-first mindset. Having one of the highest GMV to employees ratio in the industry is a testament to it. Solving the hardest problems with technology-first has given us immense leverage and velocity,” Vidit wrote in a tweet.