Abhishek Gupta is a co-founder of Circles.Life. He started the venture in 2014 with Rameez Ansar and Adeel Najam. The three set out to replace static, restrictive telco plans with plans a customer could buy and change online.
Nobody knew the brand, and a digital-only telco was new in Singapore. It took more than 100 investor meetings before the first major round came together. One investor was interested within half an hour.
Circles signed a wholesale deal with M1 in July 2015 and launched publicly in 2016. It signed more than 100,000 customers in its first year, helped by stunts such as a vending machine that paid out S$50 for S$3. Sequoia backed the company in 2019, EDBI and Founders Fund followed in June of that year, and Warburg Pincus joined in 2020.
The company then went abroad: Taiwan and Australia in 2019, Indonesia as Live.On in 2020 and Japan in 2021. By June 2022 it held more than 7% of the Singapore mobile market. Live.On customers moved to XL Axiata's AXIS brand in February 2024, and the Australian business closed in January 2025.