Meet Ankiti Bose, first Indian woman co-founder of a nearly $1.2 billion startup, Zilingo

Zilingo

• Ankiti Bose is 27, a fashion junkie, and on course to become the first Indian woman to co-found a $1.2 billion start-up.

• In four short years, she has grown her Southeast Asian e-commerce site Zilingo into a global platform with more than 7 million active users. With a rapidly expanding investor following, the start-up’s latest cash injection in February 2019 valued the business at $970 million.

And to think, it all started with a shopping trip to Thailand.

“It was 2014 and I was on holiday with some friends, some ex-colleagues actually, in Bangkok”

“We were in this market called Chatuchak,” she said, referring to the capital’s iconic weekend market. With more than 15,000 stalls and some 11,500 independent merchants, it is the largest weekend market in the world.

“I was like ‘wow, this stuff should be online!’ But they just couldn’t sell online, they didn’t know how to. That was the inception”

• Zilingo is headquartered in Singapore and helps independent fashion and lifestyle retailers sell directly to consumers

• Ankiti decided to do something about it and created an online marketplace to aggregate the region’s independent retailers and help them sell online.

• Zilingo works like other e-commerce marketplaces, in that it allows merchants to sign up and self-list their products. However, each seller is then vetted by Zilingo for authenticity, pricing, and a series of other metrics. If approved, they will be admitted onto the site and given access to services like tech support, financing and insurance.

• Zilingo charges merchants a commission of between 10% and 30% for each sale