Singapore-based digital telco startup Circles.Life has announced a pre-IPO employee stock buyback worth US$5 million.
As per this announcement, all employees with over a year’s tenure can participate in the liquidity event. Some staff members are set to gain “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in cash for the current round.
“We want to continue setting the benchmark for how Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) is done, and perhaps one day even go one better than the global tech giants in Silicon Valley,” said Circles.Life co-founder Rameez Ansar.
Circles. Life’s ESOP grants all full-time employees stakes in the company and the ability to sell vested stocks at regular intervals. It then holds ESOP liquidity events every 18 months on average, with the last round completed in July 2020.
On top of the basic salary component and performance bonus, each year, all Circles.Life employees receive two months’ base pay worth of stock options. The company’s annual cohort of top performers, called Space Explorers, are awarded an additional six-month worth of stocks vested immediately.
Launched in Singapore in 2016, Circles.Life offers no-contract mobile carrier plans with fully digital support, claiming to build a full-stack, cloud-native digital telco operating system for the 5G era and beyond.
While this is the norm in many developing nations, the approach is considered novel in developed markets such as Singapore, as incumbent telcos lock customers into 12- to 24-month contracts and provide SIM cards and customer service at offline branches.
With Circles.Life, customers can instead buy a SIM card online and pay as they go. They can take comfort in knowing that the amount they spend on mobile fees sync with the data and minutes they use.
In 2019, the telco claimed to have reached a five per cent market share in Singapore. The company then expanded to Taiwan and Australia that same year. Last year, the firm launched in Indonesia in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In September, Circles.Life inaugurated its next-gen, cloud-native telco operating system Circles X in Japan, powering KDDI Corp’s transformation with the unveiling of the digital telco brand povo2.0. The startup is looking to capitalise on this success by offering Circles X to other markets in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
The firm recently appointed a new chief people officer and embarked on a mega hiring drive to grow its Singapore core of tech and innovation talent.
In 2020, Circles.Life raised a funding round led by Warburg Pincus, reportedly putting the company “closer to unicorn status.”
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Image Credit: Circles.Life
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