On Tuesday a fashion, beauty and lifestyle marketplace or platform by the name of Zilingo (which is a play on the word zillion) raised 226 million $ from investors including Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings valuing the 4 year start-up at 970 million $, just shy of a billion $. This valuation makes one of the 2 co-founders, Ankiti Bose at 27 years young, among the youngest female chief executives to lead a start-up of that size in Asia. Female founders remain rare in the global start-up world. Of the 239 venture capital backed start-ups worth at least 1 billion $ around the world, only 23 have a female founder.
The Singapore headquartered start-up was established in December 2014, by 23 old analyst Ankiti Bose and 24 year old techie Dhruv Kapoor, who took the risk of quitting their jobs and backing themselves to start an online platform that allows small merchants in South-East Asia without an online presence and having no access to technology, capital or economies of scale to connect directly with consumers and build scale. Zilingo has grown exponentially since then and expanded into new areas such as developing software and other tools and also helping small sellers with cross border shipping, inventory management and working capital so they can buy raw material to produce goods.
With rapid adoption of smart phones and rising incomes, South-East Asia has seen a boom in online shopping, with a report by Google suggesting that from 23 billion $ in 2018, it is expected to exceed 100 billion $ by 2025. Being an established player in countries such as India, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh and Vietnam, Zilingo seems to be in the perfect position to capitalise on the booming online shopping market.
Raised in India, Ankiti Bose excelled as a student and landed an enviable job at consultancy firm McKinsey & Co. before working as an analyst at Sequoia India’s venture capital business.
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