E-commerce startup Meesho has appointed Surojit Chatterjee as an independent director to its board, Moneycontrol has learnt. Chatterjee, the former senior vice president (SVP) of Flipkart, was more recently the chief product officer (CPO) of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange platform.
Flipkart, owned by Walmart, is Meesho’s rival in India, where e-commerce wars are heating up. Flipkart currently dominates the $70 billion market, as per analysts, and competes with Amazon and SoftBank-backed Meesho, which is making strides and increasing its market share.
Chatterjee’s appointment comes at a time when Meesho is in the middle of a large fundraise. The startup has already raised $275 million in an ongoing round, which can be as large as $500-650 million in total size, Moneycontrol had first reported.
Meesho did not offer comments for the story.
Chatterjee, who has also worked at Google, Oracle, and IBM Corporation, is currently building his own generative AI (GenAI) company, Ema Unlimited, in San Francisco, as per his LinkedIn profile. He is also the second independent director at Meesho.
Rohit Bhagat, currently the non-executive chairman of PhonePe, the payments company owned also by Walmart, was Meesho’s first independent director, people in the know told Moneycontrol. He was inducted in June 2023 and has held the position ever since.
Bhagat is a seasoned professional who has previously been an independent director at Flipkart Private Limited, Axis Bank, Kunal Shah’s Freecharge, among others. With that, both Chatterjee and Bhagat have had a working relationship with Walmart’s companies either in the past or at the moment. Like Chatterjee, even Bhagat is based in San Francisco.
Including the two, Meesho has a total of eight board members. The company’s co-founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Elevation Capital’s Mukul Arora, Prosus’ Ashutosh Sharma, Peak XV Partner’s Mohit Bhatnagar, and SoftBank’s Sarthak Misra are primary investors and the other six board members.
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These developments also come at a time when Meesho is actively working to flip its base from Delaware in the United States to India as it prepares for an eventual public market listing here in the near future.
Meesho's connection with Walmart gets deeper
With Chatterjee and Bhagat on its board, both of whom have had a ringside view of the developments at either PhonePe or rival Flipkart (both owned by Walmart), Meesho has just deepened its connection with the US retailer.
Earlier in March, Moneycontrol reported that Tiger Global, an early backer of Flipkart, is leading a fresh round in Meesho as it looks to repeat the success it tasted with Flipkart.
The New York-based hedge fund made gains of approximately $3.5 billion from its bet on Flipkart after it sold remaining shares in the company to Walmart and made a fully exit.
Similarly, Meesho also engaged with Accel, another early backer of Flipkart, for its ongoing round, as first reported by Moneycontrol. While the talks between the two did not fructify, it shows evidence of how one e-commerce player is looking to tap into the legacy of another giant.
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