Who’s Making Money from Meesho’s IPO?

Meesho, the value-focused e-commerce platform, is coming to the market with a ₹5,421 crore IPO at a price band of ₹105-₹111 per share. Out of this, ₹4,250 crore is fresh issue money going into the company, while ₹1,171 crore is an Offer for Sale (OFS) where existing shareholders are cashing out by selling 10.55 crore shares. In simple terms, the fresh issue is money for Meesho’s growth, and the OFS is money straight into the pockets of current investors who are selling.​

This blog will walk through exactly who is selling in the OFS, how much cash each is taking home, and what kind of returns they are making on the shares they are tendering. You will see how founders, early venture capital (VC) funds, mid-stage backers, and late-stage investors are all coming out with very different outcomes from the same IPO. The idea is to help you read beyond the headline “big IPO” and really understand who is creating wealth here, who is just reducing risk, and what that might signal to you as a new investor.

Selling Shareholders and Payouts

The OFS in Meesho’s IPO is 10.55 crore shares, adding up to roughly ₹1,171.2 crore at the top end of the price band, and every rupee of this goes to selling shareholders, not to the company. Broadly, this sale is being done by founders (promoters), large venture capital funds, mid-stage institutional investors, and a handful of individuals who came in very early. In each case below, the “return multiple” is calculated only on the cost of the specific OFS shares, not on the full lifetime investment of that shareholder in Meesho.​

Vidit Aatrey (Chairman, MD & CEO, Promoter Selling Shareholder) is selling 1.6 crore shares for about ₹177.6 crore; on paper this translates to an eye-popping 1,850x return because his historical cost per share was only ₹0.06, but since this stake was built from 2015 as a founder through initial sweat equity and restructuring, this multiple is more of a technical artifact than a real “investor-style” return.

Sanjeev Kumar (Whole-time Director & CTO, Promoter Selling Shareholder) is also selling 1.6 crore shares for about ₹177.6 crore, with an even higher calculated multiple of about 5,550x on a cost base of roughly ₹0.02 per share, again driven by founder-era equity and later corporate restructuring rather than a normal cash investment, so using this to compare with regular VC returns would be misleading.

Elevation Capital V Limited (a large VC fund and one of Meesho’s biggest pre-IPO owners with 13.6% stake) is selling about 2.44 crore shares for roughly ₹271.34 crore, and on these shares it is booking an estimated 36.5x return, a classic “multi-bagger” outcome for an early-to-mid stage VC investor.

Peak XV Partners Investments V (Sequoia India successor fund with about 11.30% pre-IPO holding) is selling shares for about ₹192.93 crore, locking in about 25.9x return on its cost base for the OFS portion, while still staying significantly invested.

Source: RHP, internal calculation

Further, Venture Highway Series 1 is realizing more moderate returns around 2.4x, while late-stage funds such as Golden Summit Limited and Titan Patriot Fund, having invested at very high costs, are only making about 1.2x, demonstrating how returns often compress in later rounds despite large exit amounts.

Early individual investors like Man Hay Tam and Rajul Garg are walking away with exceptional returns of 217x and 258x, respectively, from selling their shares, reflecting their early bets when valuations were tiny.

Remember: these return multiples and invested amount mentioned in the table are only for the shares being sold in this OFS; many of these funds still own large stakes in Meesho, so their overall portfolio returns will also depend on post-listing price moves and any future exits.

For complete details, visit the official page of Meesho’s IPO.

Why This OFS Picture Matters

OFS details answer a simple but very important question: “When I put money into this IPO, is my cash going to the company to fund growth, or to existing investors who are selling?” In Meesho’s case, ₹4,250 crore (78% of the total IPO size) is fresh for the business, while ₹1,171.2 crore goes to current shareholders cashing out. Knowing this split helps you judge how much of the issue is about funding future growth (like tech, cloud, and marketing spends) versus giving liquidity to old investors.​

Second, the pattern of selling gives you a feel for sentiment: big early VCs like Elevation and Peak XV are taking meaningful money off the table but are not exiting fully and are accepting lock-ins on remaining holdings, which signals they want to de-risk but still believe in long-term upside. At the same time, very late-stage investors are exiting with low 1.2-2.4x multiples, which tells you that private valuations had already baked in a lot of optimism, and the IPO price is more about giving them a reasonable, not spectacular, exit.​

Investors also use the OFS data to reverse-engineer how the company’s valuation has moved round by round: when you see someone who came in at ₹1–₹2 per share now selling at ₹105–₹111, you immediately understand how much value was created in the early risk-on years. And when you see investors with cost near ₹90 per share, you can tell that later private rounds happened at levels not too far below IPO pricing, which can cap upside for new public investors at least in the short term.​

Final Take

If you strip away all the noise, Meesho’s IPO is doing two things at once: raising a big ₹4,250 crore growth war chest for the business and handing out about ₹1,171 crore of liquidity cheques to the people and funds who backed it in the private market. The real blockbuster returns are clearly flowing to founders and the earliest backers like Y Combinator, Man Hay Tam, and Rajul Garg, who are seeing hundreds of times their money on the shares they are selling, while mid-stage funds like Elevation and Peak XV are enjoying classic VC multi-baggers and still staying in the game.

For more IPOs, check INDmoney’s IPO tracker here.

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