SINGAPORE: The board of Singapore-based vogue know-how startup Zilingo mentioned on Wednesday it had suspended its CEO and co-founder, Ankiti Bose, in a transfer that sources mentioned was associated to an investigation into the corporate’s accounts.
A lawyer for Bose mentioned that she declined to touch upon her suspension or the investigation.
The corporate, which is backed by traders together with Temasek Holdings and Sequoia Capital India, mentioned in a press release that its shareholders and board members had acquired data final month that required investigation.
After this, the most important traders approved Zilingo’s board to droop Bose, pending an investigation of the “issues” raised, the corporate’s assertion mentioned.
“The main traders employed an impartial agency to analyze the matter, and the corporate is working carefully with the most important traders and the impartial agency for the investigation,” Zilingo mentioned, however declined to present specifics.
Sources acquainted with the matter mentioned Temasek and Sequoia had raised issues about Zilingo’s accounts to the corporate’s board final month. The sources declined to be named as a result of sensitivity of the matter.
Temasek declined to remark, whereas Sequoia referred to Zilingo’s assertion.
Zilingo was based in 2015 by Bose and chief know-how officer Dhruv Kapoor as a Southeast Asia centered e-commerce agency. The group has grow to be a worldwide provide chain enabler for the attire trade, offering logistics, financing and different providers to hundreds of factories and retailers.
Bose co-founded Zilingo in her early twenties and scaled it up quickly, styling herself as a job mannequin for younger entrepreneurs in search of to construct a worldwide enterprise.
Zilingo, which says it has about 600 workers in eight nations, raised $226 million in early 2019 in its final fundraising spherical, which valued the corporate at about $1 billion.
It has mentioned its gross sales quantity is greater than $1 billion yearly.
Based on publicly accessible data on Singapore’s accounting regulator’s web site, Zilingo has not filed annual returns for 2020 and 2021 to this point. – Reuters