As Meesho marked its tenth anniversary, co-founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal sat down for a reflective interview, not with a journalist or investor, but with the company’s own AI voice bot, Varsha. According to the company, the Gen AI-powered voice bot handles 60,000 customer calls daily in Hindi and English, resolving 95% of queries with minimal human intervention. It manages interruption handling, operates well on basic smartphones in noisy settings, and has reduced Average Handle Time by 50% while cutting support costs by 75%. In a candid conversation that marked a departure from typical corporate celebrations, the founders spoke openly about their early missteps, the emotional weight of uncertainty, and the unlikely journey from IIT Delhi to India’s small towns and kirana stores.
“When we started Meesho, we had no idea this is what it would become. We didn’t know what to expect. All we knew was we wanted to solve a problem — to help small businesses grow,” Vidit Aatrey, CEO, Meesho, said.
The two engineers began their venture with no prior experience in commerce or retail, and little exposure to India’s small business ecosystem. Their decision to leave secure jobs in order to experiment with a business idea left some people, including their own families, puzzled.
“At the start, our parents would ask us, ‘You went to IIT for this?’ And at that time, we had no good answer. We were just figuring it out as we went,” recalled CTO Sanjeev Barnwal. Over the past decade, Meesho has gone through multiple iterations, from a social commerce app to a full-scale e-commerce marketplace, but the co-founders say the mission has stayed consistent: enabling access and opportunity for small businesses and price-conscious consumers.
“We’ve pivoted, failed, and re-pivoted more times than we can count. But what never changed was our belief that small businesses deserve the same technology as the biggest ones,” Barnwal said. Their remarks, while lighthearted at times, also hinted at the emotional complexity of the entrepreneurial journey. “Honestly, we didn’t plan this far ahead. We just wanted to solve one problem at a time,” Aatrey said.
“In the early days, we used to sit in tiny kirana shops, helping them get online with just their smartphones. We never imagined we’d be serving hundreds of millions of customers a decade later,” Aatrey added.
Though Meesho is now counted among India’s prominent internet companies, the founders made clear that the journey was not linear, and far from easy. “We were two engineers from IIT Delhi trying to understand how to build a startup. We had no background in commerce, no family business, no experience in retail, just curiosity and willingness to figure it out,” Barnwal added.
As India wears the testament to startup culture, the global startup failure rate stands at nearly 90%. In that context, Meesho’s decade-long journey, marked by pivots, persistence, and purpose, offers a rare instance of endurance in a volatile ecosystem. For Aatrey and Barnwal, the road from being questioned by their parents to leading one of India’s largest homegrown internet companies has been neither straight nor simple. But ten years in, their story underscores what many in the startup world hope is still true: that resilience, rather than pedigree, is what ultimately endures.