If you are on the lookout for the subsequent unicorn in Southeast Asia, trials, perhaps that is just it. The 3.5-year-old e-commerce company today announced that it has raised a $226 million Series D round to leverage opportunities to digitize the Asian apparel supply chain.
With this latest round, Zilingo has raised $308 million from investors since its launch in 2015.
The latest round included Singapore investment fund EDBI and former investors Burda Capital Investments, a unit of Germany’s Hubert Burda Media and Belgian investment firm Sofina, Zilingo said in a press release on Tuesday: Reuters Agency reported.
Zilingo wouldn’t comment on the valuation of this round, but a source with knowledge of the transaction said TechCrunch that it’s a “rounding error” removed from $1 billion. In recent months, we’ve heard that the startup is approaching unicorn status, so it’s prone to occur ultimately — especially considering Zilingo got to Series D so quickly.
Raising greater than $300 million made Zilingo one of the vital well-funded startups in Southeast Asia, but its meteoric rise over the past 12 months has been fueled by its expansion from e-commerce to business-to-business services.
“One thing that has turn out to be very clear to us is that there are numerous values [in] streamlining the provision chain as an alternative of giving discounts and doing crazy marketing,” said Zilingo co-founder and CEO Ankiti Bose Technology in Asia.
The company offers quite a lot of technology tools for attire retailers, from purchasing and inventory management to social media assistance, payment processing and even business financing. Bose says it is usually constructing “cloud factories”—analogous to the centralized cloud kitchens food delivery firms create—to optimize production capability and reduce costs for its retail partners.
According to Bose, Zilingo’s net revenue has quadrupled for the reason that startup last raised funding in April 2018, with B2B accounting for about 70 percent of that.
In terms of geographic expansion, the startup will proceed to grow its presence in Indonesia, in addition to enter the Philippines and Australia, Technology in Asia reported.
“[Australian buyers] they vary rather a lot by way of what they like and what quality they like, nevertheless it’s also very much depending on cross-border trade and manufacturing in Asia,” Bose explained. “Our strategy is to have the ability to assist them wherever Asian suppliers must ship.”
