How HSBC financing fast-tracked this startup’s growth and acquisitions ambitions

Lots of dreams sit in a corner gathering dust, waiting for the day when the dreamer finally acts on them.

Thomas Laboulle, wasn’t going to dream forever: He took a leap of faith six years ago to launch Toku, a startup that provides cloud communications and customer engagement solutions.

“Many companies face challenges in leveraging their customer data across their entire organization, largely due to a highly siloed approach. This inspired the creation of Toku - we are out to build a holistic customer experience ecosystem,” the CEO and founder says.

“Our platform includes connectivity, programmatic, and application layers that seamlessly integrate with customer data libraries,” Laboulle adds. In short, this gives businesses the ability to see the entire customer journey and personalize different touchpoints in the customer experience.

With this idea in hand and a significant capital investment, Laboulle was off to the races, establishing his company in 2018.

When the Singapore-based company was starting out, Laboulle says that he had to embrace the role of a “pragmatic dreamer.” His first test was securing sales, which meant seizing every opportunity whether the prospects were large enterprises - Toku’s primary target market - or smaller startups.

“Without exaggerating, I could say that we said yes to almost everything that came our way,” Laboulle recalls.

While this approach was beneficial in developing and iterating on Toku’s early solutions, Laboulle points out that the needs of a startup and a large enterprise are two different beasts. While startups can often integrate solutions off the shelf, big organizations usually have operational complexities and legacy infrastructure that get in the way of seamless adoption.

By serving both startups and large enterprises, Toku’s early days consisted of fighting a battle on two fronts. This required careful attention and resource allocation, which diverted focus from developing tailored enterprise solutions, Laboulle notes.

By 2020, Toku had achieved financial stability and experienced significant growth, allowing it to be more selective with opportunities.

Reflecting on those early years, Laboulle emphasizes that it was important to identify when Toku could become more intentional about building solutions solely for enterprise customers.

At this point, the company was ready to focus on its next hurdle: expanding to new markets in Asia Pacific.

By setting itself up in Singapore, Toku had access to hundreds of regional and global companies headquartered in the city-state. “Roughly 95% of our contracts are signed in Singapore with Singaporean entities. But if you look at our presence, we are now delivering services in 17 countries in Asia Pacific,” Laboulle shares.

However, this strategy began to show its limits by 2022, and Laboulle recognized the need to accelerate the company’s expansion. Relying solely on direct sales from Singapore risked missing out on significant opportunities in the broader Southeast Asian economy. To address this, the CEO decided it was time for Toku to move towards growing in other markets.

Entering new countries through direct sales would be too time-consuming, so he opted for an M&A strategy to complement organic expansion.

Toku was going to need capital - lots of it.

While the firm had recently closed a series A round, it did not account for potential mergers and acquisitions. It could raise capital from VCs, but giving away equity would come at a high cost for a fast-growing company like Toku. Its board of directors determined that debt financing would be a more strategic choice while avoiding unnecessary dilution for shareholders.

However, this was easier said than done. When banks decide whether to disburse loans to startups, their checklist usually involves looking at the company’s current profile and assets, with profitability playing a huge part, Laboulle says.

Since Toku was investing heavily in expansion, its numbers weren’t the kind that banks would typically be attracted to. Laboulle was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Last year, he found the solution he was looking for.

In 2021 , HSBC launched the New Economy Fund to support high growth, preprofit businesses that aim to push to boundaries in their respective verticals. The fund targets firms with strong equity backing, proven track records with sales, and a clear path to profitability.

When Laboulle and his team found out about it last year, they quickly latched on and began collaborating with HSBC in 2024 to explore how the New Economy Fund could bolster Toku’s expansion goals. This included assisting Toku’s working capital requirements to free up cash flow, further empowering the startup to acquire new firms.

“We were positively surprised by HSBC and its method of assessing us, which was much more like how a venture capital or private equity firm would do it: looking at the innate value of the company and not just immediate financial results,” Laboulle says.

Beyond providing Toku with immediate financial firepower, Laboulle points out that HSBC has also helped his startup with other expansion matters. For instance, winning new contracts can be challenging: A new customer’s invoicing schedule might not fit Toku’s solutions well, which could cause issues.

Toku discussed a financing structure with HSBC to address this concern. The bank would serve as a financial bridge between Toku’s accounts payable and accounts receivable by providing access to funds, allowing the startup to better manage short-term cash flow gaps.

“Startups typically don’t have this kind of relationship with their bank, so I’m very happy and grateful for this,” Laboulle says.

All told, Laboulle says that tapping on HSBC’s New Economy Fund has helped Toku speed up its expansion efforts by almost two years.

“We would probably have had to wait until the end of 2025 to start relationships with other banks, because that’s the point when we would be cash flow positive,” he explains. “But now, we are empowered to materialize some of our ambitions even earlier than we thought possible.”

Looking ahead, Toku intends to collaborate further with HSBC to support more strategic acquisitions and to enhance its solution ecosystem for customers.

“Especially on the AI front, there is immense potential for us to explore and build solutions tailored specifically for the Asia-Pacific region,” he adds.

“This is only the beginning, and we’ve got much bigger ambitions,” Laboulle says.