Ankiti Bose is the startup founder of the fashion ecommerce startup Zilingo. 
Born in 1992 in Dehradun, Bose grew up in Mumbai and went to the Cambridge School before going to college at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, where she studied economics and mathematics. 

After graduating, Bose joined McKinsey & Company and Sequoia Capital in Bangalore where she worked for a while. The idea for Zilingo came about when she was exploring the Chatuchak Weekend Market in Bangkok. It was there she realised that the small independent merchants working the market had little to no online presence.

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Following the revelation, Bose quit her job as an investment analyst at Sequoia Capital in 2015 to launch Zilingo along with her cofounder Dhruv Kapoor. She was 23 at the time. The business was initially to serve as an online platform for small retailers to sell their products to the Southeast Asian market. The two moved to Singapore in 2016 to scale the business. However, the region’s low average income made it difficult for them to gain enough traction.

In 2017, Bose and Kapoor pivoted the business to becoming business facing as the two continued to raise money for their startup which was growing rapidly. In 2018, the China-United States trade war began, which paved the way for her company to grow in the US. 

In 2019, Bose managed to raise $226 million in funding at a market evaluation of $970 million, making her company just shy of achieving the celebrated unicorn status amongst startups. A unicorn in the startup space is a privately-held company that achieves $1 billion in market evaluation. 

During her time at Zilingo, Bose started programs to ensure that Indonesian women working at the company’s factory, stayed in the workforce. She has also been involved with programmes to support women entrepreneurs. 

However, she was fired from the fashion ecommerce startup on May 20 after being suspended for 51 days for inconsistencies in the company’s accounting practices. At the time of her suspension, Bose had levelled allegations of harassment and abuse against the board of Zilingo.