After completing his deployment in Afghanistan, Laboulle decided to switch gears and took up a one-year management traineeship with a consulting company. The experience proved to be formative in solidifying his resolve to join the private sector, despite the challenges faced; his first assignment was in the retail sector, where the business of parsing the intricacies of consumer psychology was a world away from his task-oriented, military-honed communications style.
Laboulle has come a long way since then. In 2018, he took the leap into entrepreneurship and founded Toku, a cloud communications and AI-powered customer experience platform. The name comes from the Japanese term meaning “to untie or to solve”, he shares, adding that it was also easy to spell and remember.
Toku is set to be listed on the Singapore Exchange’s Catalist board on Jan 22, just eight years after it was founded. Laboulle credits his time in the military for equipping him with the skills to manage under chaos and make decisions on incomplete information. “The army teaches you a great deal about discipline, resilience; and as a start-up entrepreneur, resilience is absolutely essential.”
Disrupting inefficient value chains
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Toku might be positioned in the communications space, but Laboulle got inspiration from watching how fintech start-ups disrupt banking when he first arrived in Singapore.
“I discovered the fintech value chain, which was eye-opening in terms of how much disruption was possible, simply because banks had allowed the value chain to remain so inefficient for so long,” he recalls.
That idea was etched in Laboulle’s mind even as he took on his first CEO role at GlobalRoam Group, a Singapore telecommunications company, from 2016 to 2018. The parallels between banking and communications proved uncanny, and for Laboulle, the time seemed ripe for a new player to disrupt the field.
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“There is an opportunity here where communication channels and customer data exchange are essential for large companies. If you purchase a piece of clothing and then call that brand a week later to ask a question or raise a concern, nine out of 10 times, they will be incapable of even knowing that you made a purchase,” he says. “It was clear to me that customer data needed to be connected to real-time decision-making.”
According to Laboulle, linking up such data is far harder than it seems because of the complex legacy issues older and larger companies have to grapple with. “It’s about modernising these systems and ensuring companies can truly leverage their customer data.”
Toku’s product offerings include AI voice agents for handling customer queries as well as cloud-based contact centre platforms for companies. Over the years, the start-up has won over key customers such as Indonesian ride-hailing service Gojek and Singaporean grocery and food delivery platform foodpanda.
IPO ‘not an exit’ for backers
Somewhat surprisingly for a tech start-up founder, Laboulle’s stake in the company is relatively small at just 18,673,750 shares, or 4.72%. Instead, most of Toku’s shares are held by venture capital and private equity funds, including 18.51% held by Berlin-based Delivery Hero Ventures, the venture arm of the company that controls foodpanda and similar entities in other markets. Paris-based Neptune Invest Asia owns another 14.39%, and Singapore-based Tembusu Partners holds 7.08%. Tembusu Partners is co-chaired by Andy Lim, whose spouse Lim Hwee Hua is Toku’s chair. She is also a former Singapore minister who retired from politics in 2011.
Laboulle brushes aside suggestions that Toku’s IPO is meant for existing investors to cash out. While he acknowledges that some angel investors and early backers may “take some money off the table”, he maintains that the listing is critical for Toku’s next level. “It is a stepping stone for us to accelerate our growth and move into the next stage of our journey.”
With the listing, Toku is expected to gain better recognition. “Being a listed company helps establish commercial and reputational credibility,” says Laboulle. “You don’t have to explain [your decision] to management when your procurement team selects a well-known brand. But when you select an emerging player, it requires an explanation, and the perceived risks are higher.”
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The IPO proceeds will also come in handy should any M&A opportunities surface. Toku had previously acquired in April 2023 the Southeast Asia operations of Activeo, a customer experience consulting firm based in France. While Laboulle is not naming any specifics, he is “definitely looking at opportunities” that will be accretive like in the case of Activeo.
The way Laboulle puts it, his journey with Toku is just starting. He draws inspiration from Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook as a college student in 2004 and remains at helm till today, even though the company has gone public and is worth US$1.62 trillion ($2.06 trillion). “I’ve been able to grow the company since day one, through different phases, each requiring different skill sets. I’m certainly not the same manager and leader I was eight years ago,” says Laboulle.
SGX listing gives ‘more potential upside’
Initially, Toku was aiming for a Nasdaq listing but Laboulle changed his mind after hearing about funding opportunities the local capital market can provide, underpinned by a comprehensive set of measures by the government to boost the Singapore stock market. “I liked what I saw and heard about the revival of SGX [Singapore Exchange], and all the efforts that were coming together. I genuinely believe in what they are trying to achieve,” he says.
Listing in Singapore also makes sense for Toku whose marquee clients are either Singaporean or regional brands, he reasons.
While the listing will be on the Catalist, sponsored by PrimePartners Corporate Finance, Laboulle is eyeing a move to the Mainboard in the next few years, followed by growing into the US market by tapping the planned dual-listing bridge between SGX and Nasdaq for companies with a market value of above $2 billion. Based on Toku’s offering price of 25 cents per share, its current market cap as of IPO is $126.3 million.
Most Southeast Asian tech giants have chosen to forgo a local listing in favour of the US. For instance, ride-hailing giant Grab is listed on Nasdaq, while e-commerce platform Shopee’s parent company Sea is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. That, however, does not faze Laboulle, who wants to take an ambitious but patient approach to grow his company.
“The fact that the average multiples are lower than on other stock exchanges means there is more potential upside,” he says, adding that Toku has seen interest from fund managers involved in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s $5 billion Equity Market Development Programme.
In its listing announcement on Jan 14, Toku says it has received indications of interest from Lion Global Investors, Amova Asset Management (formerly Nikko Asset Management), and Ginko-AGT Global Growth Fund to participate in the offering.
Toku’s chair Lim, as well as the company’s pre-IPO investors — Asdew Acquisitions, ICH Synergrowth Fund and Han Seng Juan, joint chair for Centurion Corp — are keen on the offering as well.
The road ahead
The road toward going public is a huge task on its own, one that Laboulle admits has taken him away from focusing on his plans for Toku. “We have been working on this [IPO] for more than a year, so I’m very much looking forward to returning full-time to the business and executing aggressively our plans to deliver on the potential we have pitched,” he says.
Putting Toku on the pathway toward profitability will be one of his priorities. From FY2022 to FY2024, revenue increased from $21.6 million to $31.8 million. However, losses widened from $3.97 million to $5.26 million over the same period. In the most recent 1HFY2025, revenue reached $16.6 million, up 4.7% y-o-y from $15.9 million in 1HFY2024, while losses were reduced by around 65% y-o-y to $961,780, down from $2.79 million in 1HFY2024.
Laboulle explains those losses stemmed from investments Toku made in areas such as legal, regulatory and security to secure contracts with major clients or government agencies.
“We now have many templates that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. With each deployment, we have learned valuable lessons,” he says. “You cannot expect to generate all your returns from your first client.”
Building credibility has enabled Toku to gain more pricing power. Laboulle says Toku has been able to raise its prices by “quite a bit” over the past five years while staying about 50% cheaper than its competitors. “So far, we haven’t seen any of our enterprise clients leave. That justifies the growing pains and the investment required to serve the enterprise market.”
Toku is setting its sights on global expansion as well. The company has already expanded into 15 Latin American markets, which shares the same operational complexities Toku has learnt to navigate in Asia. “Competing in Asia Pacific has prepared us to succeed in regions with similar fragmentation” in regulations and connectivity infrastructure, says Laboulle.
One thing is clear — Laboulle has big ambitions for the company. “I want people to associate customer experience with Toku, the same way that when you talk about CRM [customer relationship management], people immediately think Salesforce.”
