Pammi aunty’s Meesho

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Editor's note: So there Meesho was, passed up by one of the leading funds in India. Not once. Twice. Not because the fund didn’t believe in the company. Simply because they didn't understand it. The year would have been 2016, or perhaps 2017. Meesho was still an unknown entity, and the obscurity of its business was evident from the fact that it got overlooked or rejected by many like our leading fund. For the longest time, there weren’t any takers for Meesho. And then, a couple of years on, impressed by Meesho’s numbers, there were many. At one point, the social commerce company raised three rounds of funding in just about 12 months. In 2019, it became the first investment ever made by Facebook in India. It was backed by Prosus Ventures (formerly Naspers Ventures), by the US-based Knollwood Investment, and by Sequoia Capital India, the local arm of the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Eventually, the aforementioned leading fund too bought into the Meesho story. That’s a cap table that would put anybody to shame. Cut to 2021, and here is …