SINGAPORE (Mar 8): Entrepreneur Ankiti Bose is uncomfortable with her start-up being described as a “unicorn”. Reports of her e-commerce service and solutions platform, Zilingo, being worth almost US$1 billion ($1.35 billion) is, for her, a distraction at best.

Currently, her three-year-old company is valued at US$970 million, earnings it the “unicorn” label. But Bose is not trying to be precious about the label, as the reality was sweaty, humid nights holed up in a small apartment in Bangkok, packing 1,000 cardboard boxes by hand to Zilingo’s first 1,000 customers.

As she describes it, it was a “serendipitous” meeting she had with her co-founder Dhruv Kapoor over some beers at her home in Bangalore, when they both realised they shared a common dream of starting a company. With Kapoor, she started Zilingo as a platform to help small businesses sell directly to customers in 2015.

It was one holiday trip to Bangkok that sparked Bose’s idea to help small merchants sell their products more effectively online. One of the first tasks was to help merchants overcome the inefficient infrastructure that characterises much of Southeast Asia — a vast and fast-growing, but fragmented, market.

After Zilingo helped connect sellers to buyers, Bose turned to her next problem: How could she help these merchants do better?

Find out more in this week issue of<i> The Edge Singapore</i> (Issue 872, week of Mar 11), on sale now at newsstands. Subscribers can log in and <a href="https://www.theedgesingapore.com/print-edition/we-are-not-unicorn-says-founder-billion-dollar-start">read the story</a> or click here to <a href="https://www.theedgesingapore.com/subscribe">subscribe</a>.

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