Sleek's done-for-you back office bet: 15k+ SMEs, $23M Series B, profitable

Sleek is a Singapore-based platform founded in 2017 by Julien Labruyere and Adrien Barthel that runs the SME back office — company incorporation, accounting, payroll, tax compliance and e-signatures — across Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK and Australia. The bet was simple: small businesses do not want more accounting software; they want someone to make the paperwork disappear entirely.

The product strategy grew out of cost. Sleek first assembled services on DocuSign, Dropbox and Xero and reached a few million dollars in revenue organically, but as licensing costs ballooned it built its own stripped-down replacements — SleekSign and the Sleek Books accounting ledger. Labruyere says moving off Xero saved 20% of gross margin immediately, and that clients paid Sleek precisely so they would not have to deal with Xero.

The bet compounded: over five years recurring revenue grew at a 63% compound rate and gross profit rose more than 100%, with 60–70% margins and profitability across markets. In June 2025 Sleek raised a US$23M Series B led by Ellerston JAADE with participation from Money Forward, at a valuation of US$150–175M.

Sleek now serves more than 15,000 companies in four markets and is using the round to compress three years of roadmap into 18 months: automation, small-language-model bookkeeping that it claims beats human accuracy, and deeper expansion in Australia and the UK, with a goal of pushing margins above 80%.