Two men walked into accounting firms in Singapore pretending to be customers. They were not. Adrien Barthel and Julien Labruyere were quietly doing market research, and what they found shocked them: firms earning margins of around 40 percent from clients who were unhappy.
Both came from outside the accounting world. Labruyere had built a business-management career and then co-founded 4xLabs, a fintech working on foreign exchange. Barthel had spent six years in e-commerce, and was chief marketing officer at Luxola, the beauty retailer that LVMH bought in 2015. Between them they knew software, marketing and payments. They did not know accountants.
Small business owners are cautious, and the firm they hire holds their financial records.
That turned out to be an advantage. Their frustration with how slowly company registration worked was the start of Sleek, founded in Singapore in 2017. The idea was an all-in-one digital service: incorporate a company, keep the books, run payroll, file taxes, all on a platform rather than through paperwork and phone calls.
What the interviews do not say is how hard it was. Accounting is regulated work with deadlines. Small business owners are cautious, and the firm they hire holds their financial records. Sleek had to prove that software plus a team of professionals could be more reliable than the person down the corridor.
It convinced investors first. A Series A of about US$14 million, led by White Star Capital and Jungle Ventures, was later extended to US$25 million with EDBI joining. Sleek grew from Singapore into Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Australia, selling the same promise in four rulebooks.
In June 2025, it announced a US$23 million Series B led by Australia's Ellerston Capital, with Japanese software firm Money Forward as a backer. The company said it supported more than 16,000 SMEs a year, and that it would spend the money on automation and on deepening its presence in Australia and the UK.
The most useful part of the story is the method. Before they wrote a line of code, the founders sat in the customer's chair at the competition, and left with a number. Forty percent margins and unhappy customers is not a technology problem. It is an opening.