Toku eyes 1st profitable year in 2025 as acquisition bears fruit

Toku has been reconfiguring its business in the last few years. In 2018, the company rolled out its first product: Toku Telco, which helps telecommunication companies route calls and SMS messages safer and more reliably in Asia Pacific.

Since then, Toku’s suite of services has expanded to include customer engagement systems and embeddable products, powering in-app chats and calls for platforms like meal delivery service Foodpanda and ride-hailer Gojek.

Now, the company tells Tech in Asia that it expects 2025 to become its first profitable year.

The Singapore-based company had done so by making several acquisitions, but not all were successful.

The Toku management team / Photo credit: Toku

The first of these deals was buying the Southeast Asia operations of Activeo, a French customer experience consulting firm, in April 2023. This acquisition appears to be a net positive for Toku so far. According to its audited financial statements, the firm’s revenue went up by 33% year on year to hit US$28.8 million in 2023.

Toku also cut its total comprehensive loss during the same period to US$4.9 million as revenue growth outpaced rising costs.

The company says it is on track to achieve net profitability on a monthly basis by the end of this year after achieving EBITDA breakeven in the fourth quarter of 2024.

In April 2024, Toku announced it was acquiring AiChat, a customer experience platform based in Singapore. However, Toku says the deal was not completed after it made the “strategic decision” to withdraw from negotiations due to a “divergence in expectations.”

In addition to its customer engagement products, Toku offers AI-powered features like AI agents, transcription and summarization, and analytics for agent conversations.

The AiChat acquisition was supposed to be part of Toku’s efforts to push these offerings. But the company’s latest round of funding is helping to plug the gap from the canceled deal.

Just this month, Toku announced a US$5 million extension of its series A round that was led by Betatron Venture Group.

Toku plans to focus on expanding its international presence and developing its proprietary AI-powered chat, voice agent tech, and other solutions.

The company currently operates in Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Manila, and Singapore.

From texts and calls to messaging apps