Fully founder-owned and now worth $4b: How Singapore’s TDCX did it

Amid a bumper crop of Southeast Asian unicorns and a herd of private companies clamoring to go public this year, a Singapore-based company is standing out with an old-fashioned approach.

For business process outsourcing (BPO) firm TDCX, the journey toward becoming a public company has been a remarkable one. In September, the firm made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, reaching a market value of US$2.7 billion in its first day of trading.

Photo Credit: NYSE

Far from providing run-of-the-mill phone and email customer service, TDCX’s support extends to social media, AI-powered chatbots, and in-app interactions. It also provides content moderation as well as sales and digital marketing services that help companies scale rapidly outside their home markets. Its two biggest clients are Facebook and Airbnb, which combined have made up over half of the company’s total revenue in the past three years.

Up to the point of its IPO, TDCX founder and CEO Laurent Junique was the sole shareholder in the firm. Few tech companies of this size can lay claim to this feat.

See also: Why SEA’s unicorn founders give up more equity than their peers

“We’ve grown organically to become more of a boutique company rather than a high-volume player that’s relying on heavy capital to absorb a lot of volume and growth. We’ve grown really fast, but from a small point,” Junique tells Tech in Asia.

While advertising giant WPP was an early investor in the firm, TDCX largely relied on its own cash flow to fund expansion, Junique adds.

The CEO says that while the company did meet with private equity firms and that there was “some temptation and interest,” the firm eventually decided against taking more outside capital. “Eventually, it all came back down to [what] value we were getting and do we need the capital?” he says.

Helping clients expand at the click of a button

Founded before the dot-com era, TDCX (short for transformative digital customer experience) is old compared to the new wave of tech companies.

Unlike the fast-growing “new economy” firms like Facebook and Airbnb that it banks on, TDCX is an “old economy” firm at its heart.

It was launched in 1995 as a telemarketing firm called Teledirect. While it focused on servicing companies within Singapore in its early years, it later went regional when the telecommunications revolution of the 2000s drastically reduced the cost of making phone calls, which allowed its agents to be based anywhere.

In 2012, TDCX pivoted from a company providing telephone-based customer support to one that offered digital customer experience solutions across various channels.

“The sun does not set on TDCX”

Building a defensible business