Zilingo, an online fashion marketplace that is connecting long-tail sellers across Bangkok, Singapore and Jakarta, has secured around $8 million in its Series A round of funding. This round was led by Venturra Capital, Sequoia India and Susquehanna International Group.
Along with them, other investors who also participated in the current round includes Wavemaker Partners, Beenext, Beenos, and Digital Garage.
This is the second funding round raised by the company. Earlier, in November 2015, it had raised $1.88 million in seed funding from Sequoia India and Beenext Ventures. Along with them, founders of FreeCharge – Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon had also participated.
The company will use the influx of capital to capture new markets such as Indonesia and increase presence in Singapore and Thailand by on-boarding more sellers on its platform.
Zilingo was founded by former investment analyst at Sequoia India – Ankiti Bose along with her friend Dhruv Kapoor, who was working at a gaming startup in Bangalore. The platform enables sellers to list their products on its mobile marketplace. After signing up for the service, sellers get an entire seller-centre and a seller app to fulfill all their needs. They also get access to analytics, ratings, performance, and business intelligence.
Ankiti Bose, CEO and co-founder, Zilingo, said,
We charge our sellers over 10-15 percent commission… and share discounts with them and stopped doing business in verticals where there was no margin to be made. It means we reduced our burn and extended our runway while our competitors increasingly ran out of cash.
The tech team of the company is based in Bangalore. For customers, it already offers dynamic recommendations, wish-lists and social shopping. Now, it is increasing its focus towards adding in-app/in-product video content, blogs and dynamic videos, to providing users with much more engaging content.
It is also adding a visual recommendation engine and visual search features powered by Vue.ai platform from Mad Street Den. This new addition will allow consumers to upload the snaps of products and find similar recommendations on the basis of colours, styles and patterns.
Commenting about investment in the company, Tee Suraphongchai, Partner at Venturra Capital, said,
Zilingo has one of the strongest founding teams we have come across in the region. We are confident that Zilingo’s ability to execute, coupled with its proprietary technology, will allow the company to expand and become the regional leader in its category.
Zilingo currently has more than 2,000 small enterprises that sell bags, apparels, accessories, shoes and other lifestyle products on its platform. It is growing at a rate of 30 per cent M-o-M, with over 1 million app downloads and 500K active users.
