How a 27-year old built a near $1 bn startup
SINGAPORE: Zilingo Pte’s path to becoming a fashion platform with a valuation approaching $1 billion began in December 2014 when Ankiti Bose, then an analyst at Sequoia India, chatted with a neighbour at a house party in the Indian tech capital Bengaluru.
Bose, then 23, and Dhruv Kapoor, a 24-year-old software engineer at gaming studio Kiwi Inc., quickly realized they had complementary skills and similar ambitions to build their own start-up. Four months later they had quit their jobs, and each had put in their $30,000 in savings to found Zilingo, an online platform that allows small merchants in Southeast Asia to build scale.
On Tuesday, the Singapo- re-based company said it raised $226 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings Pte.
The latest financing valued Zilingo at $970 million, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information is private.
That makes 27-year-old Bose among the youngest female chief executives to lead a startup of the size in Asia.
“We were a bunch of twenty-somethings with nothing except this dream and we decided to chase it,” Bose said. Zilingo posted revenue of $1.3 million in the year ended on March 31, 2017, up from about S$434,000 since its inception though March 2016, according to the company’s most recent filing with Singapore regulators.