User:Suhashni Chakraborty

Table of contents

1. Ankiti Bose

1.1. Early life

1.2. Education and Hobbies

1.3. Building up Zilingo

1.4.  Struggles and Failures

1.5. Awards and winnings

1.6. References:-

Ankiti Bose
Ankiti Bose (born on 1992) is the first Indian business women to co-found a unicorn ($1 billion start up). The fearless first outstanding business woman of India started her Singapore – headquartered fashion industry Zilingo when she was 23 years of age with her co-founder Dhruv Kapoor. Her company is now valued at a whopping 1 billion US dollar in just four years with 7 million active users and a valuation of $970 million.

Early life
Ankita Bose, was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra in the year 1992. She is 5 feet 5 inches in height and approximately 58kg in weight. She can equated with the equation of beauty with brain because she’s worked so well with her penchant for being an entrepreneur. Talking about her beauty aspects, she has black eyes and brown hair. She had quite a pleasant childhood as her parents were well to do. Bose's father was an engineer at a state owned oil company who's job caused the family to constantly move when she was a child which made her expose to different cultures. Her mother was a university lecturer who gave up her job to raise up her daughter. Belonging to very well literate family helped her more in achieving her dream.

Education and Hobbies
Early in life she wanted to become an astronaut. She was very good at Maths, Physics and Economics. As part of her hobbies, she likes dancing and singing and she also got her training in Indian Classical Dance. She majored in economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. After being a graduate she worked with various companies, but later she caught upon the ecommerce trade of fashion and decided to make a career out of it.

After graduating from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, she worked as a Management Consultant at McKinsey & Company from 2012-14. For the next year she worked Sequoia Capital as an investment analyst. In 2015, she co-founded Zilingo and became the company’s CEO. Currently, she is handling all the activities from the company headquarters in Singapore. Even after the company being so successful, she believes that the company has not succeed even 1% and she dreams to have a 100 times more worth than it has today.

Building up Zilingo
Zilingo was derived from the word “zillion” which came in the year 2015 by Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor. The idea came up when Bose was on a holiday with her friends in Bangkok and visited a market in Chatuchak where she saw many small medium sized shops selling products, but due to lack to technology they are not able to reach to the giant crowd out there. The company first footstep in the market was by starting to help the small merchants who sell to limited customers Zilingo is an Online Fashion Marketplace Service cum ecommerce website where both the co-founders had put in $44,000 in savings. The company began with seed funding from Sequoia India and raised an additional $8 million in a Series. A funding round in September 2016. It raised an additional $18 million in 2017 in a Series B round and $54 million in a Series C round in 2018. By 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. In February 2019 Zilingo raised $226m in a new round of funding from Sequoia India, Singapore sovereign fund Temasek, Germany’s Burda and Sofina. Singapore’s Economic Development Board investment arm, EDBI, also joined in the round. With the full backend support of investor’s heavyweight investors such as Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper, the partners have raised some $28 million and currently have 8,000 merchants and more than two million users.

"I kept raising my hand and said, 'Teach me everything,'" Bose said of her pre-startup years. "I busted my ass, working 18 hours a day because it was so much fun."

Recently the American magazine Fortune has published its annual list of 40 most influential and inspiring people under 40. Arjun Bansal and Ankiti Bose are two Indian-origin individuals featuring in this list of Fortune’s 2019 ‘40 Under 40’ list.

"We were a bunch of twenty-something’s with nothing except this dream and we decided to chase it," Bose said.

Bose is now part of a group of founders in Southeast Asia who are capitalizing on the region's rapid adoption of smartphones and rising incomes. Online shopping in the region reached $23 billion in 2018, according to a report by Google and Temasek. It's expected to exceed $100 billion by 2025.

Struggles and Failures
Ankiti bose in one of her interviews talked about the struggles they faced at initial point and how failures are a part of her success. Before entering into her own start-up she worked with Mckinsey Co and Sequoia Capital which took  a huge turning point in her life and made her confident in taking the big step knowing all the risks. The most musing decision of her was to launch the company in other countries except her own home country. She said the idea behind not taking up in India was that the country is in high penetration in the field of smartphones, also the women work was necessary in this field as it is based on art and beauty. Further also a huge market opportunity was observed. Talking of the challenges the first was on setting up a high core talented team as they were launching in new countries were network facility was not upto the mark and major issue of language. At first it all appeared to be disconcerting but then she says “I think it worked in our favour.” Learning of new cultures seem to be interesting every time they entered in a new market which ultimately was not easy. But due to their new approaches the locality also seem to be corporative with them and at the end utmost trust in the local leaders was necessary to take the company to heights. Ankiti bose also gives a huge credit of success to the Chief technology officer of Zilingo Dhruv Kapoor as she mentions that it is very important to have a brilliant tech know-how in a ecommerce company which she received in the form of Dhruv Kapoor- a then 24 year old software engineer who turned up with a neighbour for drinks in her flat in Bangalore.

To get comfortable with failures was her mantra in overcoming it. With the support of team and hard work one can surely achieve success. She also gave brilliant advice regarding depression and mental health as they are very common in the start-up teams and the first step to eliminate the same is to remove the stigma attached to depressions. The company also provides access to therapy and medical care as when they need.

Awards and winnings
The CEO of Zilingo Ankiti Bose achieved lots of success at a very short period of time with all the headlines covering “The 27 year old…” Here are the awards, nominations and tittle she won.


 * Nominated for ET start-up awards 2019 “women ahead category”.
 * Featured in the list of Fortune’s 40 under 40.
 * Won the title as the first Indian woman to co-found a so called unicorn.
 * This ranked India in 52nd position out of 57 countries in Mastercard’s Index for Women Entrepreneurs etc.

“Creating a unicorn is extraordinarily impressive. Becoming a role model for hundreds of millions of young women who aspire to follow in your professional footsteps is invigorating,” Eskesen told CNBC Make It. “The success of Ankiti Bose illuminates how women can transform industries as leaders and innovators.”

References:-
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/meet-the-27-year-old-ankiti-bose-running-a-nearly-1-billion-fashion-startup/articleshow/67969939.cms?from=mdr

https://www.cnbctv18.com/entrepreneurship/meet-the-27-year-old-set-to-be-indias-first-woman-to-co-found-a-1-billion-start-up-3457031.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilingo

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-27-year-old-ceo-ankiti-bose-and-dhruv-kapoor-built-a-near-1-billion-fashion-startup-zilingo-1992595

https://celebsadda.com/ankiti-bose/

https://www.magzter.com/articles/812/347449/5cdbbb709a2de