Four years after Ankiti Bose was fired “with cause” as CEO of Singapore startup Zilingo amid allegations of serious financial irregularities, the forensic report that ended her career has never been published, no lawsuit has been filed, and Bose has quietly resurfaced in Dubai with a new investment vehicle.
Bose co-founded Zilingo in Singapore in 2015 with Dhruv Kapoor at just 23 years old. The B2B fashion-tech platform promised to connect garment suppliers, factories and brands across Southeast Asia, and by 2019 she had raised nearly US$226 million from blue-chip investors including Sequoia, Temasek and Burda Principal Investments, pushing the valuation close to US$1 billion. Media crowned her a millennial mogul and a trailblazing woman defying the odds in tech boardrooms.
The sequence that ended it is not in dispute. Zilingo suspended Bose on March 31, 2022, while it was trying to raise US$150–200 million with Goldman Sachs; lenders then recalled their entire loan. On May 20, 2022, the board terminated her employment with cause after a forensic investigation by Kroll into complaints of serious financial irregularities, and reserved the right to sue. Reporting described questions around differences between management information and reconciled figures, revenue recognition, delayed audited financial statements and more than US$7 million in payments to technology and consulting vendors over roughly two years. Bose has consistently denied financial wrongdoing, said the payments were supported by documentation, and said she was never shown the Kroll report — or the separate Deloitte review of harassment-related allegations she raised.
It never sued. Zilingo went into liquidation in January 2023, its technology assets sold to Switzerland’s Buyogo. In April 2023, investor Burda Principal Investments said “significant irregularities in reporting to investors” led to the failure and that Kroll’s work was complete, with investors still weighing legal action. Three and a half years later, no suit by Zilingo, its liquidators or its investors against Bose has surfaced, and no Singapore regulator has announced action. Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority confirmed in February 2023 that enforcement action had been taken against Zilingo for failing to file annual returns for 2020 and 2021.
Bose, for her part, raised harassment-related allegations in April 2022 concerning earlier periods; in April 2024, Mumbai Police registered a first information report arising from her complaint against Kapoor and another executive involving allegations including sexual harassment and stalking, which they denied. In May 2022 she obtained an expedited protection order from a Singapore court against an unnamed Twitter user over circulated private material and threats.
Now, according to recent reporting, Bose has relocated to Dubai, where she is deploying a new vehicle, Terra Invest, into high-end longevity and beauty clinics — ventures critics question are funded by disputed sums from Zilingo’s wreckage, claims she would dispute. The Zilingo affair remains a Rorschach test for startup governance: if the sealed report supports the board, US$308 million of investor money was never tested in court; if it does not, a founder was publicly branded on the strength of a document she says she never saw. Either way, the silence belongs to everyone involved.