Fashion Startup Zilingo Eyes International Expansion After Mammoth $226 Mn Funding Round

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The sensational Southeast Asian B2B fashion marketplace, Zilingo has attracted a huge fund that amounted to US$ 226 Million from the leading brands such as Temasek, Burda Principal Investments, Sequoia Capital, EDBI, and Sofina. The existing investors also participated in the new fundraising venture and added their contribution too.

The new Series D fund along with the Series C round added to a sum of whopping US$ 308 Million since April 2018. Zilingo is all set to make a massive entry in the fashion market in the Southeast Asian countries. It is also eyeing for the opportunities to enter bigger marketplaces in Australia, the Philippines, and Indonesia this year.

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The Singapore based company will use this fund to prepare a SaaS (software as a service) platform for the wholesalers and retailers in the fashion industry in the present and aforementioned targeted countries. The Indian entrepreneurs, Dhruv Kapoor and Ankiti Bose started the operations of their brainchild, Zilingo in Singapore in 2015. This fashion marketplace attracted huge attention within a few years due to its array of proprietary tool suite enabling merchants to contact and access manufacturers from all over Asia.

This direct channelization to connect the dots provided an excellent medium to find highly affordable procurement rates, optimized and feasible logistics, analytics and financial services from various firms.

The managing director of Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore, Shailendra Singh said, “Sequoia’s investment in Zilingo dates back to when the company wasn’t even yet incorporated and the name wasn’t finalized. Ankiti and team have rapidly transformed their original ideas about Zilingo into a platform company that serves fashion consumers, merchants, retailers, brands and manufacturers, collectively representing a multi-hundred billion dollar market size.”

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Dhruv Kapoor, Co-founder and CTO, Zilingo, said “Fashion and beauty merchants are hungry for tools that can help them scale. At the same time, the ecosystem is marred by outdated tech. So it’s imperative for us to build products that introduce machine learning and data science effectively to SMEs while also being easy to use, get adopted and scale quickly. We’re re-wiring the entire supply chain with that lens so that we can add the most value.”

Zilingo has reportedly claimed to grow 4 times over the past year and has attributed this to the enlisted merchants as they are willing to opt and pay for the elegant services fabricated by it.