Meesho Beefs Up Board With Former Flipkart Executive

Ecommerce platform Meesho has roped in Surojit Chatterjee as an independent director to its board.

The development was first reported by Moneycontrol.

Chatterjee’s appointment comes close on the heels of Meesho reportedly looking to increase the size of its upcoming funding round to $500-$650 Mn from $300 Mn earlier. Last week, the company closed a $275 Mn funding round through a mix of primary and secondary share sales.

Meesho has declined to comment on Inc42’s query about the appointment.

Chatterjee served as chief product officer (CPO) at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase for three years, i.e. from 2020 to 2023.

Prior to that, he was the senior vice president and head of product at Flipkart from 2015 to 2017. 

Besides, Chatterjee also held key positions at Google, Oracle and IBM Corporation. He is also building his own AI generative company  Ema Unlimited in San Francisco. 

He has also invested in companies like Udemy, Palantir Technologies, TrueLayer, Remote, AplhaFlow, Skillshare, Roverlabs, Activity Hero and BloomReach, as per his LinkedIn profile. 

To be sure, Chatterjee is among the two independent directors at Meesho, the other being Rohit Bhagat, currently the non-executive chairman of PhonePe. 

Bhagat was inducted in June 2023 as Meesho’s first independent director. He has previously been an independent director at Flipkart, Axis Bank and Freecharge, among others. 

As of now, Meesho has an overall eight board members. The company’s cofounders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Elevation Capital’s Mukul Arora, Prosus’ Ashutosh Sharma, Peak XV Partner Mohit Bhatnagar and SoftBank’s Sarthak Misra are the primary investors and other six board members.

It is pertinent to note that both Chatterjee and Bhagat have experience of working with Meesho’s rival Flipkart. 

Flipkart currently dominates the ecommerce marketplace followed by Amazon and Meesho. 

Founded in 2015 by Aatrey and Barnwal, Meesho claims to have over 15 Lakh sellers on its ecommerce platform from across India with more than 140 Mn annual transacting users. So far, it has raised over $1.08 Bn.

The startup counts DST Partners, Elevation Capital, Facebook and Prosus among its investors. 

Meanwhile, Meesho is actively engaged in discussions to reverse flip its US parent company, a move linked to its plans for an IPO in India. However, the company has not finalised its plans yet.

Besides, fintech firm Groww announced that it has completed the process of moving its domicile back to India as of March 2024. With this, Groww has become the second major startup after PhonePe to shift domicile to India. 

Several other Indian startups, including Zepto, RazorPay, and Pine Labs, are also looking to reverse flip. 

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