Ankiti Bose, Southeast Asia’s Tech Sensation
An almost billion-dollar valuation for her B2B fashion startup Zilingo makes her one of the few women in the industry to run a company of that size.
Ankiti Bose, co-founder and CEO of Zilingo Pte Ltd.
Photographer: Heather Sten for Bloomberg Businessweek
When Ankiti Bose finished fundraising for Zilingo in February, she didn’t mark the occasion with her boyfriend. The money had given the company a $970 million market value and turned Bose into Southeast Asia’s newest tech celebrity, but she didn’t want him to think she was showing off: Generally, women in her home country of India aren’t more professionally accomplished than men. “I was not celebrating my success,” she says. It didn’t work. The couple, who’d been together for more than four years, broke up a few months later.
Bose spent the next few months crying and singing along late at night to Lady Gaga songs from A Star Is Born, just like any twentysomething might do (she’s 28). But she also had a company to run. Because of President Trump’s trade war, American retailers were moving manufacturing out of China to avoid tariffs—giving Zilingo an opportunity to expand into the U.S. Bose’s company, which was already connecting more than 60,000 businesses with 6,000 factories globally, could help U.S. retailers find new places to manufacture their products. Zilingo has since announced plans to invest $100 million to expand in the U.S. Recently, it opened offices in New York and Los Angeles and has started working with factories in California to source fabric from Asia.