SINGAPORE — The rise and fall of Ankiti Bose, co-founder and former chief executive of Singapore-based fashion technology startup Zilingo, remains one of the most dramatic implosions in Southeast Asian startup history.
Bose founded Zilingo in 2015 and quickly became one of the region's most celebrated young entrepreneurs, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from marquee investors including Sequoia Capital and Temasek as Zilingo chased unicorn status in online fashion wholesale. But on March 31, 2022, the board suspended her following complaints concerning alleged financial irregularities, and on May 20, 2022, terminated her employment, saying it had acted with cause following an investigation by an independent forensics firm. Bose disputed the company's conclusions and the process, and resigned from Zilingo's holding-company and subsidiary directorships in June 2022.
Investor Burda Principal Investments, a division of Germany's Hubert Burda Media, later said that significant irregularities in reporting to investors had led to Zilingo's failure, noting that Kroll had been jointly hired by the main investors to examine the case. Startup publication Inc42 reported explosive allegations including US$10 million in dubious and unexplained payments, conflicting revenue figures submitted to shareholders, and a tenfold increase in Bose's salary without board approval. Temasek backed the board's investigation, saying it expected portfolio companies to abide by sound corporate governance.
Zilingo entered liquidation in early 2023, unable to recover from the crisis.
Bose fought back on multiple fronts. She filed a US$100 million defamation lawsuit in the Bombay High Court against prominent investor Mahesh Murthy, co-founder of Seedfund, over an article he wrote in a leading business magazine. Without naming Bose, Murthy had written of a woman who ran a well-known fashion portal and siphoned off Sequoia's money, alleging she had her firm pay her lawyer some 70 crore rupees in fees with much of it rumoured to flow back to her. Bose said the description was unmistakably about her, that no report or evidence had ever been presented to her, and that the US$100 million figure reflected her remaining equity in Zilingo and the damage to her future endeavours. The suit remained in the pre-admission stage.
She also raised harassment allegations: in April 2022, after her suspension, she brought harassment-related issues concerning past periods to the board's attention, prompting Zilingo to appoint Deloitte to investigate. The company said the investigation concluded it had acted appropriately and followed due process. Nearly two years later, in April 2024, Bose filed a criminal complaint in Mumbai that resulted in a first information report under Indian penal provisions covering sexual harassment and stalking, alleging demands for sexual favours, threats to remove her as CEO and late-night requests to meet in a hotel room involving co-founder Dhruv Kapoor and chief operating officer Gaurav Vaidya. Her earlier legal notice to the Zilingo board, dating to August 2020, had referred to threatening messages from fake accounts and said she had become scared to leave Singapore.
The Zilingo saga — part corporate governance scandal, part defamation battle, part harassment dispute — continues to divide opinion on whether Bose was the architect of a startup fraud or the victim of a boardroom coup.