Zilingo: Telling the Unicorn Story

Strategic PR & Branding as a Competitive Advantage, with Naushaba Salahuddin

Naushaba Salahuddin is the Director, Head of PR & Communications at Zilingo - the largest B2B e-commerce ecosystem in Southeast Asia and South Asia, having raised over $308 million in funding to date. Though based in Singapore, it has an extensive presence in Bangladesh given Bangladesh’s role in the global garments value chain.

Naushaba herself is a Communications Specialist who has worked across a spectrum of companies ranging from multinationals to startups. Prior to Zilingo she has been with Alibaba, the World bank and Marriott International. At Zilingo, she has organically grown the communications function from one member to a high-performance in-house team of 11 globally. Her PR strategy for the brand and its spokespeople has advanced Zilingo’s value proposition as an industry leader and landed its founders coveted features, as well as on influential lists such as Forbes 30 under 30, Fortune 40 under 40, and Bloomberg Icons. She is also pursuing an executive education at the University of Cambridge on Sustainable Strategies.

In the latest episode of our Women Startup Leaders series, she outlines her career spanning media to women’s economic empowerment to tech, how she handles the various moving facets of her role and manages her global team, how entrepreneurs should invest in communications as a core function early on despite limited resources, having a strong founding story as a core tenet of a company’s PR strategy and aligning said strategies with the objectives of both management and business units. We also reflect on the role of tech companies like Zilingo and their PR functions in aligning with and promoting global and national goals, and advice she has for other women in tech.

You can check out past episodes of the Women Startup Leaders series via youtube, anchor.fm and substack:

Legal Aspects of Startup Investing with Anita Ghazi Rahman

Investing in Growth Stage Asian Startups with Karen Contet

Building a Consumer First Healthcare Company with Sylvana Q. Sinha

From the Corporate World to Angel Investing with Sayma Rahman

Fostering Women in IT with Rezwana Khan

Building a Career in Impact Enterprise with Nitida Wongthipkongka