Ankiti to be first Indian woman CEO of unicorn

BENGALURU: Zilingo, a Southeast Asia-focused fashion ecommerce platform co-founded by 27-year-old Mumbai native Ankiti Bose, has reached near-unicorn status. The four-year-old startup was valued at about $970 million in its latest round, according to sources. This would make Bose — who graduated from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, with an economics and mathematics degree in 2012 — the first Indian female co-founder and CEO of a high-valued startup.

The Singapore-headquartered company’s tech is powered from Bengaluru, where its co-founder and IIT-Guwahati alumnus, Dhruv Kapoor, leads a 100-person team.

Zilingo has become the most successful new-economy venture in the region by Indian entrepreneurs, mopping up $226 million in the latest round from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek and Germany’s Burda Principal Investments (announced on Tuesday).

‘Cross-cultural sensitivity helped me’

The startup has racked up a total $306 million in funding.

Starting up for women entrepreneurs is not easy. Last year, India ranked at 52—just ahead of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt and Bangladesh—on the 57-country list of Mastercard Index for Women Entrepreneurs. Among other major startup ecosystems, the US ranked in the top five, while China is in the top 30. The number of women entrepreneurs stood at 14% in 2018, according to a Nasscom survey, up from 10% and 11% in the previous two years, respectively.

“Personally, a lot of men have been very helpful to me in my journey. But of course, if you have more women in venture capital and more female entrepreneurs, then things will get a lot better,” said Bose. She says having empathy and being sensitive when dealing with people across cultures—from techies in Bengaluru to fashion gurus in Singapore to conservative Muslim merchants in Indonesia—has helped her.

Bose was scouting for investments in Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia and Philippines for Sequoia Capital India in late 2014 when she met Kapoor in Bengaluru. Kapoor was working as a software engineer at gaming studio Kiwi. Bose, who has also worked at McKinsey in Mumbai, said that while evaluating investments in Southeast Asia, she saw that a higher number of women participate in the workforce, giving them higher disposable incomes.

Also, unlike the Indian market—where players like Flipkart (which owns Myntra and Jabong) and Amazon India, besides a slew of well-funded fashion portals Limeroad and Voonik existed—there were no players serving the Southeast Asia market. The duo figured they have complementary skill sets and started Zilingo.com in early 2015 as a consumer-facing fashion portal, looking to bring bazaars of SE Asia online.

“Ankiti was a terrific member of the analyst class at Sequoia India before starting Zilingo—she was razor sharp, hard working and always switched on ... it’s been amazing to witness her transformation into a bold and dynamic founder and business leader,” said Shailendra Singh, MD of Sequoia Capital India, which seed-funded the company back in 2015.

By late 2016, Bose realised that there was a bigger opportunity in helping small merchants scale up and compete with big brands like Zara and Uniqlo through a business-tobusiness (B2B) platform. Of the total $3 trillion in fashion manufacturing done globally, about $1.4 trillion is done from Asia, according to the company, presenting a much bigger opportunity than consumerfacing commerce business.