The idea, by the founder's own account, arrived on a holiday. Ankiti Bose was in Bangkok when she noticed how many small shops had no presence online at all. Racks of clothes, hand-lettered signs, and nothing a buyer in another country could find.
She was an analyst at Sequoia India at the time, a young woman whose job was to judge other people's companies. Her family had moved from city to city because of her father's job at a state-owned oil company, which left her used to starting over among strangers. In December 2014, at a house party in Bengaluru, she met a neighbour named Dhruv Kapoor. He would build the technology.
The real business was a tool for sellers, then a marketplace where those sellers' goods reached trade buyers.
In 2015 the two started Zilingo in Singapore, a name that plays on the word zillion. The first backer was Sequoia India, the firm she had been working for. Series A followed in September 2016 with US$8 million, then US$18 million in 2017 and US$54 million in 2018.
What nobody expected was where the money would be made. The consumer site was a shop window. The real business was a tool for sellers, then a marketplace where those sellers' goods reached trade buyers. By 2018 the seller-management tool was profitable. By September 2019, about 80 percent of revenue was B2B. That year it raised US$226 million, with Temasek joining, and its value approached US$1 billion. Bose was in her twenties, and one of very few women to run a company of that size in Asia.
Then the pandemic hit. In 2020 Zilingo closed its US and Australian offices, cut about 12 percent of its staff and lost its CFO.
The fall came in 2022. In March, whistleblowers reported payments approved by Bose to companies with no obvious link to Zilingo's business. She was suspended on 31 March and dismissed on 20 May, after an independent forensic firm looked into the books. In June the two co-founders proposed a management buyout. It did not save the company. Zilingo's technology was sold to a Swiss firm in January 2023, and the company went into liquidation a month later.
The story did not end quietly. In 2024 Bose filed a US$100 million defamation suit against an investor and accused Kapoor and a former COO of fraud, intimidation and harassment. Those are her claims in court, not findings.
For a founder, the lesson is uncomfortable. A company that grows from a spark on a Bangkok street to a near-billion-dollar valuation in four years can outrun its own controls. The money was real. The checks on it were not.