Raghuram Kuchibhatla
Raghuram Kuchibhatla built Yes!poho so handloom weavers could sell sarees straight to buyers
A frustrating saree-shopping trip in 2015 led to Yes!poho, a Visakhapatnam-registered platform launched in 2017 that lets weavers list, price and sell their own work online.
Have you ever bought a saree and wondered how much of that money reaches the weaver who made it?
For many handloom weavers, the honest answer is: very little.
Raghuram Kuchibhatla built Yes!poho to change that.
Yes!poho is an online platform where weavers and artisans sell directly to customers, without a long chain of middlemen in between. It was launched in October 2017, and the company, Yespoho India Private Limited, is registered in Visakhapatnam.
The Idea Came From a Shopping Trip
According to The Week (2021) and The Optimist (2019), the idea came in 2015.
Raghuram was visiting India and went to buy sarees for his wife.
The experience was tiring. He had to go from shop to shop. Prices were different everywhere. Many shops followed one old rule: goods once sold cannot be returned.
He saw a problem on two sides.
Buyers had a hard time finding good handloom at a fair price.
And the weavers, who did the real work, were earning very little. MicroSave Consulting reported in 2022 that he had seen handloom weavers earning less than ₹5,000 a month.
Who Is Raghuram Kuchibhatla?
The Week reported in 2021 that he studied engineering in Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, and later did a master's degree in electrical engineering in the US.
Before Yes!poho, he had built commodity and contract trading platforms.
So this was not his first business.
He brought technology and trading experience into one of India's most traditional industries.
How Yes!poho Works
The model is easy to understand.
Weavers list their products on the platform through a mobile app. As reported by The Optimist in 2019, weavers set their own prices.
When a customer orders, the weaver gets a notification.
YourStory reported in 2019 that the company used operational hubs close to weaver villages, and an agent checked each saree before it was shipped.
The company does not keep a big warehouse of stock. A case study by IIMA Ventures calls this an "asset-light" model. The artisans hold the inventory.
For buyers, Yes!poho added features to make online saree shopping feel closer to a shop visit. The Week (2021) listed three:
TryMe, a virtual try-on of a saree.
CreateMyDesign, to ask for a custom design.
Chat with Weaver, to talk directly to the maker.
The Optimist (2019) also reported a 365-day return policy. That is the opposite of "no returns".
Even the name has a story. As explained in The Week, it comes from the Spanish word for mirror, reshaped to mean "Yes! I look good in front of the mirror."
Starting Small
The big numbers did not come on day one.
In 2019, YourStory reported that Yes!poho had onboarded close to 40 weavers. They came from villages such as Veeravaram and Ramachandrapuram in Andhra Pradesh, Pochampally in Telangana, and clusters in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Bihar.
By 2021, The Week reported 10,000 artisans and more than 10,000 active products on the platform. The IIMA Ventures case study also mentions more than 10,000 weavers and over 3.5 lakh customer engagements by 2021.
A note for careful readers: the numbers about this company are not the same in every report. A 2023 Vizag magazine listing (IUE Magazine) mentioned about 60,000 members, 10,000+ products and 100+ weavers. Different reports may count "weavers" and "users" in different ways, and most of these figures come from the company itself.
More Than a Shop
Yes!poho also started the Yes!poho Institute, an online training programme for artisans.
MicroSave Consulting (2022) reported that it covers practical subjects like accounting, technology and inventory management.
The company was part of the Financial Inclusion Lab run by CIIE.CO (the IIM Ahmedabad incubator now called IIMA Ventures) with MicroSave Consulting. That work studied weavers in six states.
The research did not hide the hard parts.
Many weavers were not comfortable with digital tools.
Some did not trust a new system.
Many young people from weaving families were choosing other jobs.
The IIMA Ventures case study also listed low conversion rates, logistics and product returns as challenges.
These reports also name Meenakshi Dubey as a co-founder, a technology professional with CRM experience.
Where It Stands Today
As of November 2026, the Yes!poho shop website is live. It sells sarees, kurtis, jewellery and home decor, and lists an address in Hyderabad.
Saree prices on the site range from roughly ₹1,500 to ₹16,000.
No large outside funding round has been publicly reported.
What Students Can Learn
Good ideas often start with your own bad experience. Raghuram's idea came from one frustrating shopping trip.
Look at both sides of a problem. He saw the unhappy buyer and the underpaid weaver at the same time.
Old skills plus new technology can create new jobs. Handloom is centuries old. The app, the try-on tool and the delivery system are new.
Start small. Forty weavers in 2019 is a small number. But it was a real start.
Read numbers carefully. When a company's figures change from report to report, ask who counted, and when.
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have famous handloom clusters, from Pochampally to Uppada and Mangalagiri.
The next career in this space may not be on a loom. It may be in e-commerce, digital marketing, logistics, photography or design, working for the people who are.
