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.
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