Thomas Laboulle (Toku)
Singapore headquartered cloud communications provider Toku has successfully completed a US$5 million series A funding round, which it plans put into enhancing its product capabilities and coverage.
Delivery Hero-backed DX Ventures led the funding round, with participation from existing investors, including Tembusu Partners and Neptune Invest Asia.
"We are thrilled to be leading Toku's series A round," said Duncan McIntyre, managing partner of DX Ventures. "With the cloud communications landscape still at an early stage, we see enormous potential for Toku to grow its base of loyal customers and further extend its regional leadership.
“We were impressed by the exceptional team and their vision for bringing enterprise-grade solutions to a wide variety of businesses across Asia Pacific,” he added.
It is hoped the enhancement of Toku’s product capabilities and coverage resulting from the investment will help it to further simplify digital transformation for the region's businesses.
"You may not know this, but Toku’s story started quite inauspiciously," Thomas Laboulle, Toku founder and CEO, said in a blog post announcing the funding round. "When I founded the company in 2018, it was almost by accident.
"Three years and a lot of hard work by the whole team later, it fills me with an immense pride to announce that we’ve raised a $5 million series A, led by DX Ventures and previous investors including Tembusu Partners and Neptune Invest Asia!
"We can now take the next step in our evolution: growing the team and building new communications products to help businesses across Asia Pacific overcome the specific regional complexities of digital transformation (DX) and improving customer engagement," he added.
Indeed, Toku plans to use some of the new capital to accelerate its plans for growth and expansion in the region, diversifying its hiring and bolstering its product offerings.
The company intends to double its workforce in the next 12 months, adding more than 40 new roles across all core functions and opening several additional offices across Asia Pacific (APAC).
"As the only native APAC player in our category, we're committed to supporting the region's businesses at every stage of the digital transformation journey with cloud solutions to drive customer engagement and support hybrid working," Laboulle said.
"Customer and employee experience are two of the biggest value drivers for businesses today, so it's impossible to overstate the importance of providing seamless interactions across locations, devices and platforms. With this funding, we can help businesses do just that by expanding our product capabilities and scaling to cover more of the region's ever-changing communications landscape,” he added.
Toku’s current expansion plans involve new strategic partnerships and further development of its hosted contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) solution during the next 18 months.
The CCaaS offering is part of the next stage in Toku's evolution, the company said, to build an all-in-one platform for all its customers' communications needs, incorporating communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS), unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and CCaaS functionality, native telco connectivity and communication application programming interfaces (APIs).
More broadly, Toku said it remained focused on strengthening and expanding its cloud connectivity across the region.
Toku's core offering, cloud communications, is an increasingly important market in the local region, with plenty of tech players vying for market share. Last year, for example, Japanese tech giant NTT launched a new Cloud Communications division designed to drive customer adoption of workplace solutions at the enterprise level.
