Zilingo has suspended their CEO Ankiti Bose, after auditors raised the alarm on the company’s accounting practices. The discrepancies were discovered during a due-diligence process for a new funding round.
At the time, Zilingo was in advanced talks with Goldman Sachs to raise additional capital at a valuation of US$1.2 billion, making it a unicorn, though the talks have since broken down.
The practices in question were supposedly from how Zilingo records transactions and revenues with thousands of small merchants, and the fact that Zilingo has not submitted an annual financial report since 2019, according to Bloomberg.
Currently, investigations are led by Temasek Holdings and Sequoia Capital India. Temasek’s director of investment Xu Wei Yang had also previously been part of the company’s board, though he has since left his post.
Bose has since denied the charges, and alleged that the suspension is a “witch hunt” that was triggered by her harassment complaints towards an investor.
Founded in 2015 and based in Singapore, the company supplies technology to small fashion vendors in Southeast Asia, as part of the e-commerce business.
The company has raised several rounds of funding, with its most recent round in 2019 as a venture round.
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