Zilingo, a Southeast Asia-focused fashion e-commerce platform, is all set to become the first unicorn to be co-founded by an Indian Women. A native of Mumbai, Ankiti Bose along with friend Dhruv Kapoor started off Zilingo four years back and today the firm has reached near unicorn status with its latest round of Series D funding. The latest round of funding was from Sequoia Capital, Temasek and Germany’s Burda Principal Investments.
Valued at $970 Mn, Zilingo raised $229 Mn in the latest funding round. Zilingo is a Singapore-based firm and its tech is run by co-founder Dhruv Kapoor. The company, which started off as a fashion marketplace, has been rapidly growing its business-to-business tools and platforms, which include providing value-added services to its merchants as well as a marketplace to help them source efficiently from manufacturers.
Zilingo has 7 million active users worldwide. The concept of Zilingo was born from Ankiti’s trip to Bangkok’s famous Chatuchak market, the world’s largest weekend market. Despite having 15 thousand booths for selling goods across Thailand, Ankiti realised the lack of opportunities sellers had. And Zilingo took wings.