Meta sees rise in number of women-led businesses on its platforms

Meta is also seeing a substantial rise in women led businesses on its platforms post the Covid-19 pandemic, she said.

“Meta has almost become the default home for customers and businesses but more importantly for businesses that come from small towns. The pandemic also brought a lot of young women entrepreneurs online. We see that as a significant trend. 60% of Instagram and 50% of Facebook businesses that self-tag themselves as women led businesses have come in post the pandemic,” said Vohra.

“In India, we now skill upwards of 20 million small businesses across multiple languages,” she added.

Vohra said the company has closed partnerships with nearly 15 venture capital funds in the country to mentor and upskill small and medium businesses in India and the company will look at multiple such associations through the year. “We will go deeper with more and more VCs in 2022. What it helps us do is nearly 450 young funded businesses today run their end-to-end journey on Meta as a platform. That story is getting increasingly important for the world, for India and for us and we are very cognizant of that,” she added.

She said a lot of unicorns being talked about today were at some point part of the company’s VC Brand Incubator programme. Companies such as Mama Earth and Chaayos have been a part of the programme previously. “A lot of these businesses are the ones that are starting their journeys and a lot of them could also be those that have had physical stores but have not leveraged digital enough to grow their business,” she said.

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Meta launched the WhatsApp Business Coach chatbot a few months ago to help small and medium businesses grow their business online through WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. “That becomes a default way of enabling young entrepreneurs. We have also had the loans programme running for a couple of months now. Loans are available in over 340 cities in India. We will keep doubling down on all these areas,” she added.

Vohra said currently, the company services nearly 200 million small and medium businesses globally and that is significant. “The world is growing and so are we in enabling that world. I don’t think these are sporadic trends. If three years is any indication, that is as long as the PNL of a business. Typically, we say you need three years to turn profitable. But this is a trend that is here to stay,” she added.