Ankiti Bose, Southeast Asia’s Tech Sensation

(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.

A supply chain tech company wasn’t what Bose imagined when she founded Zilingo in 2015. She’d been working as an analyst in the Bengaluru, India, offices of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital LLP, tracking the rise of e-commerce companies such as Flipkart Ltd. and Amazon.com Inc.

A holiday visit to Chatuchak Weekend Market, a 15,000-stall bazaar in Bangkok that’s one of the largest of its kind in the world, gave her an idea. “I was like, Wow, this stuff should be online!” she says in her Singapore office. So she started Zilingo as a direct-to-consumer fashion marketplace—a smaller, digital version of Chatuchak. The company’s name is a jokey reference to the “zillions” of artisans in Southeast Asia with whom she envisioned working.

As Zilingo grew, Bose and her co-founder, Dhruv Kapoor, realized that most of the local market vendors couldn’t keep up with demand. A woman making a dress out of traditional Indonesian batik fabric didn’t have access to the capital and technology she needed to scale up. So Zilingo added services, serving as a web portal that connects the vendors with factories in places such as Bangladesh and Vietnam that will mass-produce their designs. And it began offering cross-border shipping and inventory-management software to help merchants and factories sell internationally, part of a business-to-business operation that now accounts for the majority of its revenue. Zilingo still has its online marketplace where consumers can buy everything from bikinis to hijabs, and the company takes a 10% to 30% commission for each sale. It’s also licensed to sell Disney-, Marvel-, and Star Wars-branded clothes in South and Southeast Asia.

In October the company rolled out a training program for Indonesian women who want to learn how to be garment vendors. The goal is to provide a viable career path in a country where, according to a 2017 study by Monash University in Melbourne, almost 38% of working women drop out of the labor force after getting married. By 2022, Zilingo plans to expand the program to Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Vietnam, and other countries.

Zilingo now has 800 employees, but Bose still travels a lot, checking quality control on Star Wars T-shirts at a Bangladesh factory one week, visiting women who make fabric from discarded plastic in Bali the next. The pace has been frantic and, considering the market opportunities, not likely to let up anytime soon.

According to a report by Google, Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd., and Bain & Co., the online shopping market in Southeast Asia is expected to grow from $38.2 billion this year to $153 billion in 2025. Zilingo is expanding so quickly that it’s outgrown four offices in four years and is already looking for a fifth. “This crazy growth, it’s not just hard on me, it’s hard for everyone,” Bose says. To help Zilingo expand in a more measured way, she hired a new chief financial officer, James Perry, the former managing director and head of technology investment banking for Citigroup Global Markets Inc. in the Asia-Pacific region.

The company is also offering a coaching program to its top 100 leaders. “Either people will break or become assholes—standard tech unicorn assholes,” she says. Bose is a believer in therapy, which she says helped her get over her breakup. Today, she describes herself as a feminist who’s proud of her role as the young female founder of an almost-billion-dollar company. Her late-night cry-sing sessions have been replaced by fretting about Zilingo’s future. On more than one occasion, she’s woken up worried that Trump will decide he likes China again and ruin her U.S. plans with a single tweet. “He has created such volatility that nobody really knows what will happen next,” she says. “It’s very scary.”

Even U.S. companies that manufacture clothes stateside have been affected by Chinese tariffs: A T-shirt made in California likely uses fabric from overseas. Zilingo, which guarantees that the factories it works with don’t use child labor, can help businesses ensure that the fabric is ethically sourced. The irony of a Singapore-based company helping U.S. manufacturers navigate Trump’s “Make America Great Again” policies isn’t lost on Bose. “We’re chasing a ‘Made in America’ opportunity,” she says. “Can you believe that? It’s surreal.”