How Meesho's co-founder built e-commerce for price-conscious India

Sanjeev Kumar engineered AI-led systems tailored to low-end smartphones, regional languages and first-time shoppers, helping Meesho scale to 250 million annual transacting users

Sanjeev Kumar’s approach to building Meesho, one of India’s largest e-commerce platforms by order volume, began with a contrarian premise: Indian consumers would not conform to global online shopping patterns. As co-founder and chief technology officer, Kumar designed systems around how Indians actually transact: on low-end smartphones, in regional languages, with limited trust in online commerce, and a strong preference for low prices.

 

The result is a platform with over 250 million annual transacting users as of December 2025, powered by AI-driven discovery feeds that mimic offline window shopping rather than search-based shopping. Most orders originate from personalised recommendations, not direct searches — a critical distinction for first-time internet shoppers unfamiliar with structured online buying.

 

“Sanjeev treats words like expensive API calls,” said Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director at Peak XV Partners, an early Meesho investor. “He uses them sparingly and only when they add real value.”

 

“The best technical co-founders don’t just build systems — they build leverage,” Bhatnagar said. “Sanjeev has the discipline to say no to over-engineering.”

How did Meesho remove barriers to e-commerce adoption?

Kumar’s engineering choices — multi-modal search handling voice and images in multiple languages, logistics orchestration stitching together thousands of small delivery providers, and AI-powered seller tools enabling catalogue creation from phone photos — address barriers that kept large segments of India out of e-commerce. For Meesho, which recently went public to a strong market reception, those choices define its competitive positioning in value commerce.

 

Kumar holds an engineering degree from IIT Delhi and worked at Samsung and Sony, where he worked on large-scale consumer technology systems, before co-founding Meesho in 2015. This early exposure to complex, high-volume platforms shaped his approach to building scalable and resilient technology at Meesho.

 

One of Meesho’s earliest breakthroughs was building discovery-led commerce rather than search-led shopping. Instead of expecting users to know what to look for, the platform uses AI-driven feeds. According to company disclosures, a majority of orders on Meesho originate from personalised feeds.

 

Meesho built multi-modal search that allows users to search via voice, text, or images in multiple Indian languages. Generative AI models interpret colloquial queries, misspellings, and mixed-language inputs, lowering friction for non-English users.

 

The platform, which focuses on low-priced goods, mirrors models like PDD and Shopee in China and Southeast Asia.

 

The firm has built an in-house AI stack, the Bharat ML Stack, which processes about 2 petabytes — that is 2,000 TB — of data daily.

 

Internally, Kumar’s leadership style is founder-led but people-first. Rajendra Choudhary, an architect who has worked closely with him for nearly a decade, said Kumar never lets uncertainty in systems translate into uncertainty for teams. “Sanjeev is someone who constantly pushes people to do great things,” Choudhary said. “He never gets bogged down by titles or profiles.”

How did Meesho strengthen supply and logistics systems?

On the supply side, Meesho focused on bringing small and unorganised sellers online. They can create listings using mobile phone images, with AI systems automatically generating catalogues, titles, and descriptions. Meesho also allows seller onboarding without goods and services tax (GST) registration where permitted, unlocking participation from micro-entrepreneurs previously excluded from e-commerce.

 

Logistics was another constraint. Rather than building a captive network, Meesho developed Valmo, its in-house logistics orchestration platform. Valmo aggregates thousands of small- and mid-sized logistics providers into a single delivery network using software. AI models handle partner selection, routing, and cost optimisation.

 

Shubham Sharma, a senior architect who worked with Kumar for over seven years, said Kumar has a rare ability to cut through technical complexity without oversimplifying it.

 

“E-commerce is a collection of very different systems — ranking, AI, logistics, payments, security,” Sharma said. “What sets Sanjeev apart is his ability to quickly understand the essence of a problem, even outside his immediate area of focus, and then ask the questions that truly matter.”

 

Sharma said in planning discussions, Kumar consistently pushed teams to converge on what actually mattered. “People would come in with long lists of things to build or fix,” Sharma recalled. “Sanjeev had a way of stripping that down to a single, well-defined goal that brought clarity to everything else. I’ve seen this especially in areas like security, where he would push teams to agree on one metric that genuinely captured risk. That kind of clarity changes how people think, not just what they build.”

How did Meesho build trust among first-time buyers?

Trust, a critical barrier for unbranded and regional products, was addressed through technology-led signals. Meesho invested in ratings, reviews, user-generated images, and AI-based fraud and quality detection. Fast refunds, automated risk management, and continuous monitoring helped build confidence among first-time buyers.

 

As Meesho scaled, Kumar’s role evolved from enabling growth to ensuring durability. The focus shifted to system reliability, cost discipline, and AI-driven automation that could sustain everyday usage, not just peak events.

 

The result is not just scale, but participation. Industry sources said Meesho’s technology lowered the cost, complexity, and confidence barriers that kept large parts of India out of e-commerce. Under Kumar’s engineering leadership, that approach lowered the cost and complexity of e-commerce for millions. The result is a platform where participation, not just presence, became the defining metric of success.