Circles.Life, a Singapore-based digital telecom firm, has launched a $5 million pre-IPO employee stock purchase.
Employees with more than a year of service are eligible to participate in the liquidity event, according to the release. For the current round, some employees are expected to earn “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in cash.
Circles. The ESOP at Life gives all full-time employees shares in the firm and allows them to sell vested stock at regular periods. It then runs ESOP liquidity events on average every 18 months, with the most recent cycle ending in July 2020.
All Circles.Life workers earn two months’ base pay worth of stock options each year, in addition to the basic salary component and performance incentive. Space Explorers, the company’s yearly cohort of top performers, are given an additional six months’ worth of stock that vests instantly.
“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, which began operations in Singapore in 2016, offers no-contract mobile carrier services with full digital support, claiming to be the first full-stack, cloud-native digital telco operating system for the 5G era and beyond.
While this is common in many poor countries, it is unusual in developed markets like Singapore, where incumbent telecoms lock users into 12- to 24-month contracts and supply SIM cards and customer assistance in physical locations.
Customers may alternatively buy a SIM card online and pay as they go using Circles.Life. They may rest easy knowing that the amount they pay for mobile costs corresponds to the quantity of data and minutes they utilise.
In Singapore, telecom claimed to have a five percent market share in 2019. In the same year, the firm expanded to Taiwan and Australia. Last year, at the height of the COVID-19 epidemic, the company started in Indonesia in 2020.
Circles.Life launched its next-generation, cloud-native telco operating system Circles X in Japan in September, enabling KDDI Corp to launch the digital telco brand povo2.0. The business hopes to build on its success by expanding Circles X to additional Asian, European, and Middle Eastern regions.
The company just hired a new chief people officer and launched a massive hiring push to expand its digital and innovation talent pool in Singapore.
Circles.Life obtained a fundraising round headed by Warburg Pincus in 2020, bringing the firm “closer to unicorn status,” according to reports.
