Zilingo Co-Founder Ankiti Bose On Pivots, Resilience And “Pathological” Optimism

A message from Co-founder and CEO, Ankiti Bose to team Z on our optimism about the current market, our path towards profitability, and how we intend on making the most of the unprecedented opportunities in front us in 2021

A message from Co-founder and CEO, Ankiti Bose to team Z on the latest business developments and growth curve in the face of the pandemic.

A message from our founders to our team on recent company developments, restructuring exercise and business plans in a post-COVID world

Ankiti Bose, Co-founder and CEO of Zilingo, with Fortune's Claire Zillman at the Fortune MPW Next Gen Summit on Wednesday. As part of our celebration of Women's History Month, Fortune talked to a range of female founders whose companies all have something in common: a mission to help women. Molly Hayward is the founder and chief brand officer of Cora, which makes organic tampons and pads. Hayward was inspired to start the company after learning about how periods stopped girls from attending school in some parts of the world. For every order it sells, Cora now provides menstrual products to girls in need. "Every 'no' was just the motivation to keep going," Hayward says of building the company.

Founded by Dhruv Kapoor and Ankiti Bose, B2B fashion tech startup Zilingo Technologies has used the growing mobile and data penetration to envision a technology platform for SMEs. Using technology, it has been able to broaden the sourcing base for fashion-lifestyle companies, and enable financing where banks and NBFCs were not ready to finance these businesses, and to provide additional services using data in the form of intelligence and analytics.

Bangkok, 10 March 2020 - In celebration of International Women’s Day, Zilingo joins over 2,000 other business leaders around the world by signing the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), developed by UN Global Compact as a sign of commitment to empowering women in the workplace, marketplace, and community. These principles are the result of a collaboration between the UN Global Compact and UN Women and are adapted from the Calvert Women's Principles® to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Ankiti Bose is CEO of Zilingo, an online fashion retail business (B2B and B2C). She has been featured in the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30, Fortune 40 Under 40, and Bloomberg 50 lists. In visiting Chatuchak market in Bangkok, she noticed a gap in the fashion industry: while small- and medium-sized enterprises had a lot to offer and were hungry for growth, they were ill-equipped to scale up or to compete with global players without the right tools and software. She set out to level the playing field by starting Zilingo with Chief Technical Officer Dhruv Kapoor. In March, Zilingo formally committed to the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), which UN Women helped develop to promote fairness for women in the private sector. Bose, 28, is an Indian national now based in Singapore.

Four years ago, during a house party in Bengaluru, Dhruv Kapoor, an engineer at gaming studio Kiwi Inc, had a conversation with his neighbour Ankiti Bose who was an investment analyst at venture capital firm Sequoia. Both had reached a point in their careers where they wanted to create their own start-up. But they had contrasting skill sets and had done different kinds of work. “But we had a very common vision (about) the future of technology and commerce,” says Kapoor. Later, after many similar conversations, the duo quit their jobs and in 2015 launched their own start-up, Zilingo, a commerce and technology platform that powers the entire fashion supply chain. A lot has changed for Kapoor in these four years. Early last year the firm raised $226 million from marquee investors such as Sequoia, Sofina and Temasek. The funding valued the firm at about $970 million.

Material Exchange, a footwear & apparel brands trust, partnered with Zilingo, a technology platform that powers fashion supply chain, in 2019 with an aim to promote sustainability within fashion supply chains and to enable brands connect to suppliers with the help from the Material Exchange digital material library and the Zilingo commerce platform.

The Singapore-headquartered technology platform scales up global supply chain capabilities with acquisition of Sri Lanka-based Software-as-a-Service company. Leading technology platform Zilingo has bolstered its position as a global digital supply chain enabler with its acquisition of Sri Lanka-based software company nCinga Innovations. The acquisition is touted to be one of the largest tech exits in Sri Lanka in recent times. The deal marks a major win for the region’s startup ecosystem.

Ankiti Bose charted Zilingo's road to progress by changing track from being a fashion marketplace to a service provider to businesses. Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor brought their maiden venture Zilingo within sniffing distance of becoming a unicorn within four years of launching their company in 2015 largely by taking a few unusual and tough calls. Its gradual transition into an entity focused on business-to-business (B2B) sales, as against the Southeast Asia-focused fashion marketplace that Zilingo started out as, is a case in point. “Scaling down our business-to-consumer [B2C] business is definitely one of the toughest decisions we have made recently,” says Bose, co-founder and CEO.