Thread by @shreyans512

An analyst working at Sequoia went on a trip to Bangkok and came back with a $970 million startup idea: Zilingo. This is the story of Ankiti Bose:

The year was 2014. Ankiti was on top of the world. She had got a job at Sequoia as an investment analyst!

Her job was to study startups and meet with startup founders.

But after talking with the founders, she was bitten by the startup bug.

She realized: "I want to start my own startup too and I need to do it soon, otherwise, I’ll never do it."

Luckily, she got her startup opportunity that same year when she went on a trip to Bangkok with her friends.

There, she visited "Chatuchak": the huge market organized every weekend in Bangkok where local shopkeepers sell clothes and bags and fashion accessories. People from Singapore and Hong Kong and India would fly to Bangkok just to visit this market.

Ankiti was surprised. Why were people flying from far away to visit this market? Why not make it online? It would benefit people and shopkeepers both.

The problem was: the shopkeepers didn't understand eCommerce. So they couldn't sell their products globally.

Bingo! Ankiti got her startup idea. Now, all she needed was a co-founder.

Finding a co-founder turned out to be more difficult than finding her startup idea because hardly anyone in India was interested in solving the problems of Bangkok shopkeepers.

But then she met Dhruv Kapoor at a party in Bangalore. They got talking, and Dhruv was amazed by the idea. So they decided to start working on this idea.

Both Ankiti and Dhruv quit their jobs, pooled their savings($60k), and thus, Zilingo was born.

Initially, they decided to make Zilingo like an eCommerce website where people could buy products from the Bangkok shopkeepers.

Dhruv began coding the website in Bangalore and Ankiti went to Bangkok to convince shopkeepers to signup for Zilingo.

At first, it seemed like the idea was working. Shopkeepers started signing up for Zilingo, people started buying from Zilingo and they got funding from Sequoia and others.

But by 2016, Ankiti realized the problem was much bigger than she had thought.

The bigger problem was: Shopkeepers didn't know how to manage their supply chains, inventories, insurance, loans, etc.

Only building an eCommerce website wouldn't help them. They needed much more help.

So Ankiti decided to pivot. From a simple eCommerce website, Zilingo became a B2B service provider for shopkeepers.

That same year, Zilingo launched a supply chain software for shopkeepers.

Next year, Zilingo launched a fintech product so that shopkeepers could get loans with low interest rates.

In 2018, they launched Asia Mall so that shopkeepers could buy raw materials at affordable price

Today, Zilingo is a $970 million near-unicorn startup with 7 million buyers and 10k merchants!

But more importantly, by creating a near-unicorn in just 3 years, Ankiti has become a role model for millions of women across Asia!

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