Zilingo

What did it do?

Zilingo was a Singapore-based fashion e-commerce platform founded in 2015 by Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor. Starting out as a mobile-first marketplace, it gradually turned into a B2B platform offering technology and sourcing services to the fashion supply chain. It operated in India, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia and the US.

Why did it shut down?

After rapid expansion, the company closed its US and Australian offices in 2020 and made two rounds of layoffs. In March 2022 whistleblowers reported to the board payments approved by CEO Ankiti Bose that appeared to have no connection with the company's operations. Bose was suspended during an accounting investigation and, in May 2022, dismissed for insubordination. With the leadership crisis in full swing, no new capital could be found and the company ceased operations in 2022. It went into liquidation in February 2023; lawsuits relating to the collapse of the business are still ongoing.

The story

Zilingo, whose name comes from the English word "zillion", was founded in Singapore in 2015 by two young founders of Indian origin, Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor. The idea was to bring small fashion sellers in South-East Asia together on a mobile marketplace. Bose quickly became one of the region's most talked-about founders; in 2019 Bloomberg described her as a 27-year-old CEO who had built a fashion start-up worth close to $1 billion.

Investors were keen too. Starting with seed funding from Sequoia India, the company raised $8 million in 2016, $18 million in 2017 and $54 million in 2018. In its 2019 Series D, Sequoia India, Burda Capital and Sofina were joined by Temasek, Singapore's state investment fund, bringing in $226 million. Total funding reached $308 million, making Zilingo one of the region's best-funded start-ups. Meanwhile the model was changing: by September 2019, 80 per cent of revenue came from B2B services digitising the fashion supply chain.

The expansion proved costly. In 2020 the company closed its US and Australian offices to focus on Asia; in July a second wave of layoffs hit Thailand, India and Indonesia, and the finance director resigned. The real crisis came in the spring of 2022. At the end of March, whistleblowers reported to the board unexplained payments, approved by Bose, to companies with no connection to the company's operations. Bose was suspended while an accounting investigation was under way and, after a 51-day suspension, was dismissed in May 2022 for insubordination.

With the leadership crisis in full swing, the company could not find the capital it needed to survive and ceased operations in 2022. In January 2023 it sold its technology assets to Buyogo of Switzerland, and in February 2023 it went into liquidation; according to sources, there was nothing left to distribute to creditors. The legal battle did not end there: in 2024 Bose accused her former co-founder Kapoor and former chief operating officer Aadi Vaidya of fraud, threats and harassment, and filed a defamation suit against them. The cases between the parties are still ongoing.

Zilingo's story is a reminder that governance is not bureaucracy but a survival tool. In a company that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, the question of how payments were approved was not settled in time, so when the crisis came, trust broke once and never returned.

Lessons for founders

• Control payments approved by the founder with a second signature and regular internal audits; build governance before the first big round, not after you have grown.
• If your business model is shifting from a marketplace to B2B services, shrink the office and staff costs of the old structure just as fast.
• When a crisis breaks out between founders and investors, secure the company's cash runway before the dispute turns into litigation.

Sources

1. Zilingo (Wikipedia)
2. Singapore's Zilingo to Liquidate After Crisis at Fashion Startup (Bloomberg News, 2023-01-20)
3. Zilingo Fires CEO as Clash Over Embattled Startup Escalates (Bloomberg News, 2022-05-20)
4. E-commerce startup Zilingo raises $226M to digitize Asia's fashion supply chain (TechCrunch, 2019-02-12)

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