Fidelity Investments, an asset management company that has invested in several publicly listed as well as privately held Indian companies, has marked up the valuation of a company in its startup portfolio.
The US-headquartered firm has increased the face value of its investment in social commerce platform Meesho in its books by 14.3% to $43.24 million as of July 31, as per its latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The markup comes after Fidelity reduced the fair value of its investment in the Bengaluru-based company to $37.84 million as of March 31, filings showed.
With Fidelity’s latest markup, Meesho is now valued around $5.04 billion.
Fidelity had invested $42 million in Meesho as part of its Series F funding in which the company raised $570 million at a valuation of $4.9 billion. Other marquee investors that participated in the round included B Capital Group, Prosus Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Facebook, Footpath Ventures, Trifecta Capital and Good Capital.
Meesho earlier this month said it turned profitable, saying it is the first horizontal e-commerce firm in India to achieve the feat. It also said the company recorded a 43% rise in its order volumes in the last 12 months.
The e-commerce company, which was founded by Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal in 2015, enables small businesses and entrepreneurs to sell their products directly to customers on the platform without any fee. It pits against the likes of Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart in India’s ecommerce space.
In April 2021, Meesho had achieved unicorn status after it raised $300 million led by SoftBank. The fund-raise then valued it at $2.1 billion--a three-fold jump from its previous funding round of $125 million in 2019 when it was valued at $700 million.
Having achieved profitability, Meesho is also looking to go public in the next 12-18 months, the company’s chief financial officer Dhiresh Bansal said in an interview earlier this month.
“We feel that the growth, scale and profitability are there (for an IPO), but you also want to make sure that there is enough of a track record for market investors to look at,” Bansal said.
