The high-tech oligipoly, Facebook continues to eye global expansion. A while ago, it took full-page advertisements in Indian newspapers and magazines to whip up some excitement for its groups.
Facebook also acquihired Bengaluru-based startup Little Eye Labs in 2014 and launched its Marketplace in India last year.
Now comes news that Facebook has invested in the Indian startup Meesho. Meesho, is a play of words on meri shop (“my shop” in Hindi). The startup was founded in 2015 by Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, who were batchmates at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
The Bengaluru-based startup was incubated at Y Combinator, the top American startup accelerator in 2016. Thus far it has raised over $65 million, including a $50 million series C funding round just about seven months ago. According to its LinkedIn profile, Meesho has 478 employees.
The company’s post on its blog highlights
13 June, 2019: Today is an exciting day for Meesho! We’d like to announce that Facebook has made an investment in Meesho, which will help us further our efforts to enable independent entrepreneurs to build businesses and grow their customer base via social channels.It has been an amazing journey for us and we cannot wait to do more, as we work towards our goal of building a bigger community and enabling millions of entrepreneurs to be successful. Over the last 4 years we’ve grown from our humble beginnings, to a community of more than 15,000 suppliers and 2,000,000 resellers throughout India. We share a common goal with Facebook – to enable the community and help small businesses grow. We’d like to thank our entrepreneur community, investors, and everyone who has had faith in us from the beginning – we can’t wait to keep building.