Publicly, the company seemed to be going from strength to strength.
In July 2019, James Perry, former managing director and Asia-Pacific head of technology investment banking for Citigroup, joined Zilingo as its first chief financial officer.
It was a coup for Bose, about 20 years Perry’s junior.
Bose said in an interview with Bloomberg News in 2019 that Perry’s experience and respect in the financial world would compliment her “young and crazy” self and give confidence to investors. “He’s James Perry, he’s a god in finance,” she said.
In the investment world, her big target remained Son, whose SoftBank Group had upended venture capital by making huge bets on unproven start-ups. Bose told her deputies that Zilingo needed to achieve rapid growth to catch Son’s attention, one of the deputies said.
Bose met Son twice that year, once in Jakarta and a second time in Tokyo, according to people familiar with the matter. She explained her vision for Zilingo, but Son never backed her. Neither did KKR & Co, which was considering investing in the start-up at the time, the people said.
A SoftBank spokesperson declined to comment.
In October 2019, Zilingo announced it would spend US$100 million to expand into the US, establishing offices in New York and Los Angeles.
Bose’s idea was to take advantage of President Donald Trump’s trade war by offering American retailers a way to avoid tariffs by finding producers outside China. Less than a year later, the company shut its US operations.
By the end of 2019, Singh and other directors had told Bose several times to slow the cash burn. But Singh wasn’t getting regular financial reports from Bose, and it wasn’t till a board meeting in November that the directors learned that the company was actually going through about US$7 million to US$8 million a month, more than they had expected.
Singh picked up the phone and had a tough conversation with Bose, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.
GUZZLING MONEY
It turns out that the company was guzzling money. The US$226 million Zilingo had raised from investors in early 2019 was gone in less than two years.
In 2020, the pandemic battered the business and Bose saw an opportunity to supply personal protective equipment, inking a deal in April to supply 10 million KN-95 masks, valued at US$22.5 million, to India.
Six months later, Zilingo was embroiled in a legal battle with the Indian government, which claimed the company had failed to deliver 3.2 million of the masks on time. The company didn’t comment on the lawsuit, which is still ongoing.
In September, Perry left Zilingo to rejoin Citigroup.
Inside the company, former employees paint a picture of a boss who ruled by fear.
She allegedly told some staff they’d have no second chance in the start-up industry because of her powerful connections. She would publicly shame employees and declare that she had to do everything herself to save the company, one person said. Another described her as a narcissist who would throw anyone under the bus if it meant saving her own reputation.
Asked in an interview in Singapore before she was fired about the culture under her leadership, Bose uncharacteristically paused and stared out of the window as the sun set over the city.
“I was 23 when I started the company,” she said eventually. “I liked having control at the beginning. Of course I made mistakes and learned from them. By the time we got to the stage where we had all these senior people, I don’t think I was a control freak.”
In her most recent interview with Bloomberg in July, Bose reiterated that she has not done anything wrong.
In future, she said, “I’m going to be a lot calmer, a lot more empathetic and understanding of how people work together. That has been a big learning for me. Managing people, managing relationships, managing communications — I think all of this is coming down to that.”
By November 2020, Zilingo had barely enough cash to last a month. A group of existing investors including Sequoia, EDBI, Sofina, Temasek and SIG stepped in to rescue the company by purchasing US$25 million of convertible notes.