Zilingo_CEO_Ankiti_Bose

Zilingo, a Singapore-based online fashion platform that champions women, announces that it has launched offices in New York and Los Angeles over the summer. The next move, the company said in an article published by DealStreetAsia, that it will be looking into expanding its sales and product teams there with US$100 million in investment.

Zilingo just raised US$226 million in a Series D round in April, joined by existing investors Sequoia Capital, Burda Principal Investments, and Sofina, as well as new investors Temasek Holdings and EDBI, putting the company’s estimated value at close to US$1 billion at the time.

Zilingo was founded in 2015 by Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor, providing an e-commerce platform that allows fashion merchants to sell to end consumers in Southeast Asia. The startup claimed that it has branched into solving “upstream” problems in the fashion supply chain industry such as sourcing, software, data, and financing.

It targets five key areas: software, data science, financial services, sustainability, and compliance in fashion.

“The fashion industry is exploitative, wasteful and, frankly, completely broken,” said Ankiti Bose, co-founder, and CEO of Zilingo. “Zilingo brings technology to a supply chain that hasn’t changed since the industrial revolution to level the playing field in fashion so that businesses – no matter how big or small – can have access to a fair, transparent, affordable, fast supply chain.”

Also Read: Zilingo CEO Ankiti Bose on failures, challenges, handling depression and more

According to DealStreetAsia, in its Indonesia PE-VC Summit 2019 in January, Zilingo co-founder and CEO Ankiti Bose said that the startup was likely to venture into offline retail and eventually pursue an IPO as a “logical path” for it.

Recently, Zilingo announced an initiative called SheWorkz that seeks to bring women back to the workforce, on their own terms, and pave the way toward greater financial independence without the constraints of a traditional workplace. SheWorkz will provide vocational training, financing, and business development opportunities, starting with women in Indonesia, where it was launched last week.

–

The post Online fashion platform Zilingo to pour US$100M for its US expansion plan, adding multiple new markets appeared first on e27.