Ankiti Bose is 27, a fashion junkie, and on course to become the first Indian woman to co-found a $1 billion start-up.
In four short years, she has grown her Southeast Asian e-commerce site Zilingo into a global platform with more than 7 million active users. With a rapidly expanding investor following, the start-up’s latest cash injection in February 2019 valued the business at $970 million.
And to think, it all started with a shopping trip to Thailand.
“It was 2014 and I was on holiday with some friends, some ex-colleagues actually, in Bangkok, ” Bose told CNBC Make It.
“We were in this market called Chatuchak,” she said, referring to the capital’s iconic weekend market. With more than 15,000 stalls and some 11,500 independent merchants, it is the largest weekend market in the world.
“I was like ‘wow, this stuff should be online!’ But they just couldn’t sell online, they didn’t know how to. That was the inception,” said the CEO.
Zilingo is headquartered in Singapore and helps independent fashion and lifestyle retailers sell directly to consumers.
Founding a fashion empire
Bose was then a 23-year-old investment analyst working for major venture capital firm Sequoia Capital in her native India.
Based in the country’s tech hub, Bangalore, she was closely following the rise and rise of major e-commerce names like the US’s Amazon, China’s Alibaba and India’s Flipkart. But she was struck by the lack of opportunities at that time for small-time merchants in Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asia represents one of the world’s largest manufacturing hubs, but many local producers lack the economies of scale to sell directly to consumers. They therefore must rely on third-party distributors — often to the detriment of their profit margins and working conditions.
Bose decided to do something about it and created an online marketplace to aggregate the region’s independent retailers and help them sell online.
“It was a bit of a David and Goliath idea,” said Bose, now 27, referring to the Biblical parable of the young boy who took on — and defeated — a giant.
Zilingo works like other e-commerce marketplaces, in that it allows merchants to sign up and self-list their products. However, each seller is then vetted by Zilingo for authenticity, pricing, and a series of other metrics. If approved, they will be admitted onto the site and given access to services like tech support, financing and insurance.
Zilingo charges merchants a commission of between 10% and 30% for each sale.
“It’s these small merchants against the big brands and the malls and the big internet companies. (I thought) how do you help them become big ... and grow on the back of that?” said Bose.
A meeting of minds
For that, Bose, a math and economics graduate, said she knew she had to draw on “the great leveler” — technology.
“Technology companies have a better shot at scaling things in a way that’s non-linear,” Bose said. “Hundreds of distribution agents all over Asia are leaking away margins from the real people that deserve it, and I think it is only technology that can solve that.”
That tech know-how came “serendipitously” one night a few weeks later, in the form of Dhruv Kapoor, a then 24-year-old software engineer, who turned up with a neighbor for drinks at her flat in Bangalore.
“Neither of us was actually supposed to be there, but we showed up anyway,” Bose recalled, referring to her now co-founder and Zilingo’s chief technology officer, Kapoor.
“So here’s this guy, sitting on the couch in my living room having a beer, and he’s talking about back-end, and what he does with gaming and analytics and this and that. And I say ‘hey, you know what, I’ve been thinking about this thing, what do you think about it?’”
Kapoor, himself an entrepreneur, was quickly sold. Within six months, they both pooled their savings — $30,000 each — quit their jobs (and convinced a handful of trusting friends to do the same), and set about making their idea a reality.
“Most people that start companies together know each other for years, they’re dorm mates or whatever,” acknowledged Bose. “But we just hit it off and we knew that what we wanted to do together was the same.”
Shopping for buy-in
Initially, that meant getting buy-in from merchants. So Bose traveled across Southeast Asia to convince retailers that Zilingo could help grow their businesses.
“Everybody was solving for access to the internet, but what about everything else that goes on before you actually sell the product? ” Bose said, listing procurement, design and financing among those hurdles. “We said ‘hey, what about if we plug all those gaps.’”