Zilingo Series C round ends with $54 million in the bag.
An online Fashion startup founded by Indian entrepreneurs Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor is making news already. Usually finding investors is a very difficult task for any startup but not for Zilingo. It raised $18 million last September and it recently announced raising $54 million via series C round. This has made its total fund raising till now to $82 million from investors.
Raising this much money is rare any startup in Southeast Asia. Series C round involved many big names. Sofina an investor in Flipkart-owned fashion site Myntra led the round. Burda, Sequoia India, Manik Arora, Tim Draper, SIG, Venturra, Beenext also invested big in the round.
What has made Zilingo stand out?
What started out as an online sales company has now diversified its supply chain. It now caters to merchants, retailers and brands for both B2C and B2B sales.
Consumers in Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore are catered directly through Zilingo’s e-commerce site zilingo.com. It ships internationally to four more countries. The technical team is setup in India while it has supply bases in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia. Having a wide spread supply chain has helped in its B2B sales.
Revenues have been rising rapidly
They have played it smart. It allows consumers to sell its products on any other site. So even rivals like Zalora sometimes sources its products from sellers on it. This liberty has made revenues skyrocket. The company claims that revenue has grown 10 times in the last 12, months with more than 10,000 sellers and two million products now on the Zilingo.com platform.
That rapid rise in revenue is primarily thanks to a move into Indonesia. Merchants are now using it to buy fashion items to then sell to consumers. They have now access services such as loans or credit, making it easy for them to work. The once-core B2C business from Zilingo.com accounts for just 40 percent of the revenue currently.
Shifting focus on B2B has worked for Zilingo.
