Zilingo, a Southeast Asia fashion e-commerce website founded by 27-year-old Ankiti Bose in 2014, is all set to scale new heights, approaching USD 1 billion valuation, making Ankiti Bose among the youngest female chief executives to lead a start-up of the size in Asia.
According to Bloomberg, the idea was hatched in 2014 when Bose was an analyst at Sequoia India. Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor, a 24-year-old software engineer at gaming studio Kiwi Inc., started working on building their own start-up. This all happened after they both chatted at a house party in the Indian tech capital Bengaluru. Four months later, they had quit their jobs, and each had put in their USD 30,000 in savings to found Zilingo, an online platform that allows small merchants in Southeast Asia to build scale.
The Singapore-based e-commerce marketplace Zilingo on Tuesday, raised USD 226 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings Pte. The latest financing valued Zilingo at USD 970 million, said Bloomberg report. “We want to enable traditional businesses to digitise and unlock margins through Zilingo software so some of our funding will go into developing the technology stack. We’re also looking to expand our markets in Indonesia, Philippines, and Australia,” Ankiti told Yourstory.com.
