IIT Delhi to civil service dream, then Meesho: Vidit Aatrey's Rs 95,000 crore journey

Coming from a middle-class family with parents in government service, a conventional career was seen as the natural choice. However, Vidit Aatrey's years at IIT exposed him to new career possibilities and the growing startup ecosystem. After IIT, Aatrey worked with ITC and InMobi.

In Short

• Aatrey studied electrical engineering at IIT Delhi and graduated in 2012
• Jobs at ITC and InMobi shaped his understanding of business and technology
• Early ventures including Fashnear faltered as customers wanted variety over speed

For Vidit Aatrey, the expected career path was quite different from the one he eventually chose. After graduating from IIT Delhi, he was expected to pursue a secure career, with civil services among the options his family had in mind.

Instead, Aatrey moved into the world of startups and went on to co-found Meesho, which is now valued at around Rs 95,000 crore.

Aatrey completed his BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi in 2012. Coming from a middle-class family with parents in government service, a conventional career was seen as the natural choice. However, his years at IIT exposed him to new career possibilities and the growing startup ecosystem.

After IIT, Aatrey worked with ITC and InMobi. These experiences gave him an opportunity to understand how businesses operate and how technology could be used to solve everyday problems. His career gradually moved away from the secure path his family had expected him to follow.

FROM IIT DELHI TO STARTUP EXPERIMENTS

The early days of Aatrey's entrepreneurial journey were far from the success that Meesho would eventually achieve. He and his co-founder Sanjeev Kumar initially launched Fashnear, a hyperlocal fashion delivery platform.

The idea, however, did not work as expected. The founders realised that customers were looking for greater variety rather than simply faster delivery. They went back to the drawing board and tried another model focused on helping sellers establish an online presence. That too failed to achieve the scale they wanted.

Instead of abandoning the idea, the founders began spending more time with small businesses. They travelled to markets in places such as Surat, Jaipur and Delhi's Chandni Chowk to understand how local sellers operated.

During this process, they noticed something interesting. Many women were already using WhatsApp to run informal businesses. They would source products from suppliers, share them with customers through their personal networks and manage sales themselves.

The founders saw an opportunity in this behaviour.

HOW WHATSAPP SELLERS LED TO MEESHO

The problem was that WhatsApp was never designed to manage an entire business. Sellers could communicate with customers and showcase products, but payments, orders, logistics and customer management had to be handled separately.

Aatrey and Kumar decided to build around the behaviour that sellers already had instead of forcing them to adopt an entirely new way of doing business.

They developed Meesho Supply, a managed marketplace connecting suppliers with individuals who wanted to sell products through their social networks. The model began gaining traction, with orders increasing rapidly. The company was eventually renamed Meesho, derived from "Meri Shop".

The idea was simple: allow individuals, particularly small sellers and women entrepreneurs, to create their own digital shops without having to build the technology themselves.

The founders' willingness to experiment also helped them secure a place in Y Combinator. Their application focused less on a polished presentation and more on the problem they were trying to solve for Indian women entrepreneurs.

FAILED IDEAS BECAME BIGGEST LESSON

Aatrey's journey is therefore not simply an IIT-to-startup success story. It is also a story of repeated experimentation.

The first business model did not work. The next one struggled to scale. It was only after the founders spent time observing small sellers and understanding their existing habits that they found a model with significant potential.

That approach eventually helped Meesho expand beyond social commerce into a broader e-commerce marketplace.

By the end of 2024, Meesho had nearly 190 million users and around 400,000 sellers, while its revenue rose 26 percent to Rs 9,900 crore in FY25, according to figures cited by Moneycontrol.

The company subsequently went public in December 2025. Its IPO raised Rs 4,250 crore through a fresh issue, along with an offer for sale of about Rs 1,171 crore. Meesho shares were listed on the NSE and BSE on December 10, 2025.

As of August 20, 2026, Meesho shares were trading at around Rs 205 each, giving the company a market capitalisation of roughly Rs 95,000 crore.

For Aatrey, the journey from an IIT Delhi engineering degree and a career path that included the possibility of civil services to leading a large e-commerce company was shaped by a series of decisions that were far from conventional.

His story also shows that an IIT degree does not necessarily have to lead to a traditional engineering or government career. In Aatrey's case, the campus became the starting point for a journey that eventually led to entrepreneurship, several failed ideas and, ultimately, Meesho.

- Ends