A startup claims to help companies reduce incorporation and governance headaches

Adrien Barthel refers to his startup as an “unsexy business.”

Instead of running with the new and shiny technologies of today, like blockchain or cryptocurrency, he and his co-founder Julien Labruyere decided to go with a more down-to-earth business idea: an online corporate services platform called Sleek.

The idea was inspired by the co-founders’ poor experiences working with local corporate secretaries.

The Sleek team / Photo credit: Sleek

“The one thing Julien and I had in common was a frustration for the lack of customer centrism of traditional corporate service providers,” reveals Barthel. “We felt that there was little transparency on pricing, no digital tools, and poor reactivity to deliver the service.”

As appointing a company secretary is a requirement for anyone running a private limited company in Singapore or a limited company in Hong Kong, the duo saw the opportunity to build a business around optimizing the process.

“Corporate secretary work is usually the last preoccupation one has when it comes to building a company,” Barthel says. “Unfortunately, it was not the case for us back in the day, so we decided to tackle this basic issue that affects business owners.”

Founded in 2017, Sleek aims to be a one-stop solution for entrepreneurs to incorporate their businesses in Singapore as well as manage their governance, accounting, and tax matters.

Supporting entrepreneurs

A key problem Sleek is trying to solve is taking away the admin hassle that comes with building a business. The Singapore-based firm does this by assuming the role of a compliance officer, offering its clients packages like free incorporation and the appointment of a director and/or corporate secretary. It also covers basic services such as changing company names, registering business addresses, and declaring and distributing dividends.

Sleek caters to many different customer segments, including startups, foreign owners, venture capitalists and accelerators, small- and medium-sized enterprises, and special purpose vehicles. As each entity has different compliance requirements and bookkeeping needs, the company offers packages at varying price points.

At a glance, Sleek charges a base annual fee of S$800 (US$580).

This amount is relatively low compared to the usual cost of registering a startup, which may add up to around S$1,500 to S$2,500 (US$1,000 to US$1,800), depending on how much work a company would like to outsource.

Taxes and miscellaneous costs are not included and are handled on a pay-per-use basis.

On top of their usual services, the company also offers added value to their clients through partnerships with global players such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Stripe, HubSpot, as well as local champions like Xero, Flyspaces, Hmlet, EnterpriseSG, and the Action Community for Entrepreneurship, among others.

The startup’s growth

Is it a tech company?