Zilingo, a play on the word “zillion” was founded in 2015 by Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor with a vision to use technology to put responsible and efficient business within everyone’s reach.
The company began with seed funding from Sequoia India and raised an additional $8 million in a Series A funding round in September 2016. It raised an additional $18 million in 2017 in a Series B round and $54 million in a Series C round in 2018. In July 2020, the second round of retrenchment was carried out in Thailand, India, and Indonesia offices, with an estimated additional 12 percent of employees being laid off globally.
Ankiti Bose, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Zilingo, a business-to-business e-commerce site, is on track to become the first Indian woman to found a unicorn company – all before she turns 30.
When it comes to entrepreneurship, Ankiti Bose is something of a legend. It is not the case that entrepreneurship was in her DNA. Her mother was a college lecturer and her father worked for the government. In her words, it is the “foolish courage” that made former McKinsey & Company management consultant make the fateful leap into entrepreneurship.
“There was a lot of foolish courage involved in starting up,” Ankiti tells “It was a decision completely driven by passion and optimism. I saw the opportunity in South-East Asia; the growth of the region looked like it could be phenomenal because it was super under-penetrated. But had I over-analyzed the situation, it would’ve been harder to make the decision.”
Ankiti has aided Zilingo in reaching its current valuation of US$970 million, which is just US$30 million short of the unicorn threshold of $1 billion.
“Being a unicorn company was never the goal,” she admits. “And it was never about just selling clothes to businesses and somehow working in fashion. Zilingo was genuinely created to make fashion more fair, transparent, and sustainable. We think that we’re making a difference and making the world better. So, for us, that valuation doesn’t really mean anything unless we’re delivering really solid outcomes for our shareholders.”
Zilingo became a B2B platform in 2017, putting together merchants and raw material wholesalers on one platform to make sourcing simpler and more transparent.
COVID-19 has taught the world the importance of digitization. “For us, it’s been phenomenal because most of the businesses that we would have otherwise had to convince to use our technology already know they need it. Now our entire pitch doesn’t even need to happen,” Ankiti says. “Our business has actually grown in the sense that it has become more profitable over the last year.”
The journey even after the success was not that easy for ankiti. she still found herself in meetings where she was mistaken for an assistant or a model for the products on the platform even after the success of Zilingo.
“The world is not a level playing field. And I think anybody who says or thinks that it is fooling themselves,” she says. “There are definitely biases in every industry, and it’s harder for minorities, for women, and for LGBTIQA+ people to scale the corporate ladder.
“Today, women like me are the exception, but I hope for the next generation, we’re the rule.” Says, Ankiti Bose. She also added, “When I look at the success of the women around me, whether it’s Kamala Harris or the Bumble Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe, I’m just incredibly happy; not just in a sense that, ‘Oh my God, this is happening.’ But in a sense of, ‘Wow, this is achievable’ – a 31-year-old woman with a baby in her arms is ringing the bell at NASDAQ.’ It’s just amazing.
