Meesho raises USD 125 mn in funding round led by Naspers

The other participants in the funding round were Facebook and existing investors SAIF, Sequoia, Shunwei Capital, RPS and Venture Highway, the company said in a statement. Former Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin also participated in the round.

Meesho is a social commerce online marketplace in India that enables independent resellers to build small businesses by connecting them with suppliers.

The company also provides logistics and payment tools on the platform. These sellers then sell within their social networks on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

"The new funds will enable strides towards this goal by allowing the company to make deeper inroads in areas outside India's major metro regions, by creating more entrepreneurs, and as a result reaching remote customers not serviced by traditional e-commerce marketplaces," it said.

Meesho also plans to use the new funds to further build its technology platform to accommodate new product lines, and to evolve its analytics and machine learning platforms to handle national scale. At the same time, in addition to expanding its network coverage to new geographies, the company will further deepen its operations in existing geographies.