Entrepreneur’s 35 under 35 list is presented by Blenders Pride Reserve collection. This list includes some unconventional names from the field of entrepreneurship. Ankiti Bose is a 27 years old Mumbai native, who co-founded Zilingo with Druv Kapoor (both IIT Guwahati alumnus). She has graduated from St. Xavier’s college Mumbai with economics and math’s degree in 2012. ‘Zilingo’ is a southeast Asia focused fashion e-commerce platform.
It has grown over 11 times in revenue over last 12 months, which has helped it reaching unicorn status. Bose realized that there was a bigger opportunity in helping small merchants scale up & compete with big brands like Zana & Uniqlo through a B2B platform. Some of Bose’s early inspiration came from a visit to Bankok’s popular chatuchak market, which features more than 15,000 booths selling goods from across Thailand.
She realized the sellers didn’t have sufficient opportunities to expand. 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 is expected to exceed $100 billion by 2025.
