Ankiti Bose, has shocked the startup world. The Chief Executive officer of Singapore top ranked startup Zilingo Pte, has was suspended Chief Executive Officer Ankiti Bose after an effort to raise new funding led to questions about the company’s accounting, according to people familiar with the matter.
Ankiti Bose (born 1992) is the co-founder and CEO of e-commerce start-up Zilingo. She has been featured in Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list in 2018 as well as in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 along with Bloomberg 50 in 2019.
Ankiti Bose is 27, a fashion enthusiast, and was touted to become the first Indian woman to co-found a $1 billion start-up.
In a short span of time, she has grown her Southeast Asian e-commerce site Zilingo into a global platform with more than 7 million active users. With a rapidly expanding investor following, the start-up’s latest cash injection in February 2019 valued the business at $970 million.
And to think, it all started with a shopping trip to Thailand. “It was 2014 and I was on holiday with some friends, some ex-colleagues actually, in Bangkok,” Bose had told CNBC Make It.
Her Company, which supplies technology to apparel merchants and factories, had been trying to raise $150 million to $200 million with help from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. when investors began to question its finances as part of the due diligence process, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information is confidential.
The talks, which could have boosted Zilingo’s valuation to more than $1 billion, stalled, they said.
The startup’s investors, which include Temasek Holdings Pte and Sequoia Capital India, have started an investigation into the financial practices, the people said. Zilingo’s auditor raised questions about its accounting, they said. The concerns center on the way that Zilingo, which regulators said had not filed annual financial statements since 2019, accounted for transactions and revenue across a platform spanning thousands of small merchants.
Ankiti Bose When did the troubles start?
Zilingo’s troubles come at a time when some of the Sequoia-backed companies have been in the news for issues related to corporate governance and financial audits. These include fintech firm BharatPe and social commerce platform Trell.
On March 12, ET was the first to report that EY India was conducting a forensic audit at Trell. Subsequently, ET reported citing sources on April 4 that Sequoia had called for the probe at Trell after receiving whistle-blower complaints
Ankiti Bose has disputed allegations of wrongdoing and contends her suspension was due in part to her complaints about harassment, according to two people close to the situation. She has hired an attorney to represent her, Abraham Vergis of Providence Law Asia, and has called the investigation a “witch hunt,” according to correspondence reviewed by Bloomberg News.
Zilingo and Temasek declined to comment. Both Ankiti Bose and her lawyer declined to comment.
Two of Zilingo’s directors, Temasek’s Xu Wei Yang and Burda Principal Investments Ltd.’s Albert Shyy, left its board last month, according to regulatory filings. Zilingo had hired James Perry, a Citigroup Inc. veteran, as its chief financial officer in mid-2019, but he left about a year later to return to the U.S. bank.
Newswire Bloomberg first reported the developments at Zilingo. The Bloomberg report said Bose was also called for a meeting on March 31 with three board members and was told about the complaints and alleged irregularities.
