Circles.Life to increase SG workforce by 25% and beef up tech and marketing roles

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Circles.Life is looking to boost its headcount by 25% over the next 12 months and expand its Singapore core of tech and innovation talent. Key hires will include tech and “tech-lite” roles such as software engineers, product managers, and digital marketers across new and existing business lines. This is part of its plans to take its proprietary Circles X Digital Telco Operating System (OS) to global markets.

Delbert Stanley Ty, head of marketing for Circles.Life, told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that it aims to grow the marketing team across both B2C and B2B verticals by at least 50% by the end of 2022. It currently has around 45 employees within regional marketing and growth functions across Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines, among other countries. Globally, Circles.Life has over 450 staff in Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and South Asia; its staff in Singapore have grown two-fold since 2019.

The hiring initiative will allow Circles.Life to build upon the success of its partnership with Japanese telco KDDI, which recently launched a new digital telco brand, povo2.0, running on the Circles X OS1 created by Circles.Life. The cloud-native Circles X OS delivers beyond the traditional telco operations support system and business support system in enabling seamless customer experiences and engagement. Circles.Life aims to establish the world’s first 100% cloud-based, full-stack vertical Software-as-a-Service telco business, and replicate its successful digital telco model in more markets.

To support its ongoing hyper-growth phase of international expansion, Circles.Life recently appointed tech veteran Stephanie Nash as its chief people officer, a newly-created role in the telco company. In that role, Nash will steer Circles.Life’s global talent and culture strategy so the company can achieve its ambitious growth targets.

Circles.Life co-founder Adeel Najam said that as a homegrown Singapore startup, it believes in developing together with the local tech community as it embarks on this phase of aggressive expansion into global markets and new business verticals. “We see incredible potential to build Circles.Life into the next made-in-Singapore global tech brand, and want to quickly scale up our capabilities to bring our world-class digital telco tech and innovation to many other markets," he added.

Meanwhile, The Business Times reported that Circles.Life laid off less than 5% of its employees worldwide in 2020. Quoting Najam, BT said the retrenchments were a move to "fine-tune the model of operations" as Circles.Life eyes international expansion. Its back-end operations, for example, were consolidated in the Philippines, BT added. Najam added that the retrenchments were not made as a result of monetary pressure amidst the pandemic. According to BT, Circles.Life experienced a restructuring exercise last year and incorporated its ultimate holding company, Circles Asia Cayman Limited in the Cayman Islands.

In February last year, the company received a "substantial investment" from global private equity firm Warburg Pincus to accelerate its growth and expansion into new markets.

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