WEF India Economic Summit 2019: Zilingo Plans To Rope In Indian Apparel Makers

Zilingo is looking to partner with Indian textile manufacturers as part of its push towards solving supply chain challenges of small merchants in Southeast Asia.

The Singapore-based online fashion platform’s focus towards India comes at a time when the U.S. and China are embroiled in a trade war, affecting supply chains in the Southeast Asian region.

“Just how global politics is shaping up, India can also be seen not just as a technology hub, but also an upcoming apparel manufacturing hub for some of the brands we work in Asia, U.S. and western Europe,” Ankiti Bose, co-founder and chief executive officer at Zilingo, told BloombergQuint in an interview.

The 28-year-old entrepreneur said her firm has already started working with manufacturers in Tirrupur and Ludhiana.

The platform, which earlier this year raised $226 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings Pte, is nearly a unicorn, valuing just about $950 million.

Launched by Bose and Dhruv Kapoor in 2015, it started as a platform to bring sellers online and sell. It has now evolved into a platform to help sellers with services like analytics software and management tools that make sourcing from factories in Bangladesh and Indonesia easier. It also helps them with cross-border shipping and inventory management.

Bose said the opportunity is huge as the apparel industry is worth $3.8 trillion but is highly inefficient. “The supply chain has a lot of middlemen and they lack digitisation. There is a lot of opportunity to create products that help merchants to improve margins.”

WATCH | Nishant Sharma in conversation with Ankiti Bose.