Zilingo

Zilingo, a play on the word "zillion," was established in 2015 by Ankiti Bose[4] and Dhruv Kapoor.[5] The idea came from when Bose was on holiday in Bangkok and noticed that many of the small and medium-sized shops had no online presence.[6][7]

The company began with seed funding from Sequoia India[8] and raised an additional $8 million in a Series A funding round in September 2016.[9] It raised an additional $18 million in 2017 in a Series B round[8] and $54 million in a Series C round in 2018.[10]

The company started off as a long-tail fashion marketplace leveraging Southeast Asia's growing internet connectivity to bring small merchants from the street markets of Bangkok and Jakarta into the e-commerce fold, supported by distribution, cataloguing and financing services Zilingo began to offer.[11]

After beefing its distribution capabilities, Zilingo expanded focus towards B2B opportunities across the supply chain with an eye on service opportunities the platform could offer to transform a fragmented, inefficient, cash and tech-strapped value chain.[12][13]

The focus towards B2B opportunities started with a suite of basic products to help merchants and manufacturers manage their e-commerce business. This initially included inventory management and sales tracking, and today the company has graduated to deeper services like financing, sourcing and procurement, and a ‘style hunter’ for identifying upcoming fashion trends.[14]

So they expanded, developing software and other tools to allow vendors to access factories from Bangladesh to Vietnam and also help with cross-border shipping and inventory management. Since 2018, Zilingo has also worked with financial technology firms to provide working capital to small sellers so they can buy raw materials to produce goods.[15] The company takes a cut whenever a deal is brokered or a sale is made via its platform,[16] with a business model effectively removing removes a lot of the agents that brands and factories inefficiently deal with. This also ensures that profits can be evenly spread across all stakeholders in the fashion industry, thereby edging the company towards its vision of making the fashion supply chain a levelled playing field.[17]

In September 2017, Zilingo was shipping to eight countries and has seller hubs in Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand, adding 5,000 new merchants in the previous twelve months.[8] By September 2019 the company generates 80% of its revenue from its business-to-business operation of matching brands with suppliers in Southeast Asia and South Asia, with aggressive moves to expand in the United States.[18]

In 2019, the company raised $226 million in a Series D round from existing investors Sequoia India, Burda Capital, Sofina with Singapore's sovereign fund Temasek Holdings joining the tech-platform's capital table.[19] The latest round takes the tech-platform to US$308 million from investors, making it one of Southeast Asia's highest capitalised startups- edging its valuation towards unicorn status.[20] The company announced that it planned to invest US$100 million to build out its fashion supply chains in the US, as part of its accelerated growth plans in new markets such as Australia, Europe and the Middle East.

Amidst the global economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zilingo announced that it was laying off 5% of its global workforce. A total of 44 employees based in Singapore were dismissed via a Zoom teleconfering call, with employees expressing disappointment at the company's decision despite the Singaporean government's 75 per cent subsidy of local employees wages and the management's lack of post-retrenchment support.[21] The company has also been reported to close its US and Australia offices in 2020, to focus on its core business plans in Asia.[22]. Subsequently, retrenchment was done in Thailand, India, and Indonesia offices, with an estimated 120 employees getting layoff.