Singapore-listed customer-experience technology company Toku has established a wholly owned subsidiary in the United Arab Emirates as its Middle East deployment with food-delivery platform Talabat expands across eight markets.

Toku said its new entity, Toku Technology L.L.C., was incorporated on August 24 and is its first in-country subsidiary in the Middle East. The company said the local structure will allow it to contract, invoice and hire in the UAE and participate in government and semi-government tenders across the country and the wider Gulf region.

The move follows a regional expansion that began in December 2025. Toku said its Middle East footprint has since grown from two markets to eight, while its deployment with Talabat now supports more than 8,000 users.

Talabat deployment expands across all eight markets

Talabat operates across eight Middle Eastern markets, and Toku said its customer-experience deployment has now expanded across that footprint.

The company initially entered the region with digital customer-service deployments before adding voice alongside chat. Toku said customer satisfaction subsequently rose to approximately 80 percent, representing an uplift of more than 20 percent. Those performance figures are company-reported and may reflect the specific workflows and measurement methods used in the deployment.

The eight-market rollout gives Toku a regional reference customer as it tries to expand further into large enterprises and public-sector organizations. The company said the UAE subsidiary also gives it the legal and operational presence needed to pursue more local contracts.

TNGlobal previously covered Toku’s first Middle East deployments in late 2025, when the Singapore company began building a regional presence beyond its established Asia-Pacific operations.

UAE entity adds a local operating base

Toku founder and Chief Executive Officer Thomas Laboulle said the Middle East business had developed faster than the company expected after its first deployments last year.

Incorporating a local subsidiary can remove some of the operational friction that comes with serving a market entirely from abroad. Toku said the UAE entity will support local contracting, invoicing and hiring while positioning it to participate in public-sector tenders.

The company said it is already participating in a number of government and semi-government opportunities in the region. Toku did not disclose the value or status of those tenders in the supplied announcement.

The expansion also adds another geographic leg to a business that has historically been focused on Asia. Toku listed on the Singapore Exchange earlier in 2026 and has been building a larger regional footprint around cloud communications, customer experience and AI-enabled contact-center services.

SESTEK partnership focuses on Arabic-language AI

Toku is also working with Turkey-based conversational AI company SESTEK under a memorandum of understanding signed in June 2026.

The partnership is intended to add support for Gulf Arabic dialects and multilingual code-switching, where users shift between languages within the same conversation. Toku also said the companies are working on locally hosted deployment options aimed at organizations with data-residency requirements.

Those capabilities are particularly relevant to banks, telecommunications providers and public-sector organizations, where language coverage and the location of customer data can affect whether an AI system can be deployed in production.

Conversational systems developed primarily around standard English or another single language can perform unevenly when customers use regional dialects, mixed-language speech or market-specific terminology. For Toku, the SESTEK relationship is intended to localize the AI layer while it uses the UAE subsidiary to localize commercial operations.

Middle East expansion becomes a test of localization

The practical test will be whether Toku can turn early regional deployments into a broader customer base while adapting its technology to local language, regulation and data requirements.

The Talabat rollout shows that one deployment can be extended across several countries, but government, financial-services and telecommunications customers may require more market-specific controls. Local hosting, Arabic-language performance and in-country contracting will therefore become part of the product and operating model rather than administrative details around it.

Toku’s Middle East expansion is still at an early stage. The new UAE entity, eight-market Talabat deployment and SESTEK partnership give the company a larger base to pursue regional business, but the pace of further growth will depend on converting tenders and enterprise opportunities into recurring commercial deployments.

Toku Enters Middle East Market with its First Regional Deployments