Anikiti Bose- India’s first woman to co-found a $1 Billion start-up
Would you believe if we tell you that 27-year-old Anikiti Bose has become the first-ever women entrepreneur in India to co-found a start-up worth $1 Billion? March is the month dedicated to celebrating achievements of women entrepreneurs of India; the team of Inventiva has decided to narrate her success story of Zilingo- one stop for all your fashion needs.
Anikiti Bose and Zilingo
For Anikiti Bose, one of the most successful entrepreneurs, it all began with a shopping trip to Thailand in the year 2014. She was in the very famous weekend market of Bangkok called Chatuchak where she was stunned to see 1,500 different stalls and almost 12,000 merchants selling things independently.
It was that time when she thought that what if people could buy these things from the Bangkok streets by sitting in any different place. However, later she realized it was not possible because the sellers of that market didn’t actually know how to do that. It was finally after this inception of hers, that the CEO, Anikiti Bose formed an online platform named “Zilingo” which enable independent fashion retailers to sell their products online.
The founding of Zilingo-biggest fashion selling platform
At the time of forming Zilingo, ANikiti Bose was just a 23-year old was working one of the leading companies in Bangalore as an investment analyst. It was during that time, when she got the opportunity to keep up with the economic trends of various e-commerce companies such as Amazon from the U.S, Alibaba from China and Flipkart from India. After studying and analyzing the e-commerce business in detail, she realized that these entire platforms have very fewer opportunities for small-scale merchants of South-east Asia.
Anikiti says;
“It was a bit of a David and Goliath idea,” said Bose, now 27, referring to the Biblical parable of the young boy who took on — and defeated — a giant.
What is Zilingo?
Zilingo is not like any other e-commerce fashion company available online for people to buy different things. Rather it is a website which allows small-scale merchants to directly sell their products to customers in a different part of the world. In turn of this opportunity, the team of Zilingo charges the merchants a fee of somewhere between 10%-30% on each sale.
Bose also added;
“It’s these small merchants against the big brands and the malls and the big internet companies. (I thought) how do you help them become big … and grow on the back of that?”
The tireless dedication of Zilingo team
We all can agree to the fact that the start-up which has now become successful is the result of tireless dedication, hard work, many sleepless nights working on the project, travelling to different places to meet-small scale merchants and a lot more. On this woman’s day, we would like to appreciate the youngest woman Billionaire for her success.
