Circular Rents You the iPhone. Then It Rents It Again, Five More Times.
A Singapore startup asked a plain question: why buy a gadget you'll replace in two years? Its answer - subscribe, return, refurbish, repeat - has pulled in Y Combinator, AirTree Ventures, and the founders of Carousell and StashAway.
There is a drawer in most homes that tells the whole story. Inside it: a phone from three upgrades ago, a tablet with a swollen battery, a laptop nobody wants to wipe and nobody wants to throw away. It works. It just isn't wanted. Circular, a Singapore company founded in 2021, built a business around that drawer - and around the quiet idea that you never needed to own the thing in the first place.
The pitch is simple enough to explain at a dinner table. Instead of buying an iPhone, a MacBook, an iPad Pro or a ThinkPad, you subscribe to it. You pay a monthly fee, you use the device, and when you're done you send it back. Circular refurbishes it and rents it to the next person. Then the next. The company designs each device to run through roughly six subscription cycles before it is finally recycled. People have started calling it the Netflix of gadgets, which is close enough that Circular uses the line itself.
01 / THE IDEAA former fintech chief who stopped financing stuff
Circular's founder and CEO, Nick Ramsay, did not arrive at this by way of environmental activism. He came from finance. Before Circular he was chief product and technology officer at MoneySmart Group, one of Southeast Asia's largest financial product aggregators - a company built to help people compare loans, cards and insurance. Somewhere in that work he noticed something that bothered him. As he put it, the products he was building "only serve to reinforce the linear economy and legacy concepts of ownership." They financed buying. They rarely questioned whether buying was the point.
He left, and in 2021 started a company designed to do close to the opposite. Ramsay was joined by co-founders including Pantha Roy, now chief product officer, a former quant trader with degrees from Imperial College, Cambridge and an INSEAD MBA, along with Yaniv Bernstein and George Oliver. In the Winter 2022 batch, Y Combinator backed them. The team today is around 25 people.
02 / THE MATHWhy one device for six people actually works
The interesting part of Circular is not the app. It's the arithmetic. A retailer sells you a laptop once and books the margin once. Circular buys the same laptop and earns from it repeatedly, spreading the cost of the hardware across several subscribers over its life. That is what lets the monthly price undercut a typical retailer payment plan while still, eventually, paying for the machine several times over.
One Device, Six Lives
The flexible terms - 3, 6, 12, 18 or 24 months - do a lot of quiet work here. So does the free damage protection, which covers up to 90% of repair costs. Renting an expensive machine is only comfortable if a cracked screen doesn't ruin your month, and Circular knows it. For anyone who grows attached, there's an exit: buy the device outright, with half of what you've already paid in subscriptions credited toward the price.
03 / THE PRODUCTPhones, laptops, and a plan for business
On the consumer side the catalogue looks like a good electronics shop - the latest iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones, iPad Pros, MacBooks, ThinkPads, and gaming products. What changes is the price tag: instead of a lump sum, a monthly line. Reported starting prices in Singapore have included an iPhone 15 Plus from around S$74 a month and a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 from around S$94.
Indicative starting monthly prices reported around 2023. Actual pricing varies by term and availability.
Then there's Circular for Business, aimed at startups and SMEs that need to put good hardware in front of a growing team without sinking cash into machines that lose value the moment they're unboxed. For a young company watching its runway, treating laptops as a monthly subscription rather than a capital purchase is an easy argument to make to a finance lead. Alongside both sits a stock of professionally refurbished devices - the returns from earlier cycles, wiped, tested and offered at a discount.
04 / THE MARKETEurope needed $330M to prove this. Asia was wide open.
Device subscription is not a brand-new idea. In Europe, Grover built a large business on it and raised roughly US$330 million to do so. What makes Circular's position interesting is geography. The Asia-Pacific had almost no equivalent when Circular started, even as two trends collided across the region: electronic waste piling up faster than almost any other waste stream, and secondhand device sales beginning to outpace new ones. Singapore's government has been pushing hard on e-waste reduction. Circular walked into that gap.
Competition exists but is thin. ITEZ.SG operates in Singapore with a business-leasing focus; the real rivals are the defaults - retailer instalment plans, telco financing, buy-now-pay-later, and the plain habit of buying outright. Circular's bet is that a generation raised on subscribing to music, film and software will find owning a depreciating rectangle increasingly quaint.
05 / THE BACKERSWho's betting that ownership is over
In October 2023 Circular closed a US$7.6 million seed round led by AirTree Ventures, with participation from the YC Continuity Fund, Global Founders Capital, Partech Ventures and January Capital. The company was reported at a roughly US$30 million valuation. A follow-on of around US$3.3 million in 2024 pushed total funding to roughly US$11 million. Before the seed, Circular said it had grown about threefold in a year, and that it saw about twice as many long-term subscriptions as short-term ones - a sign that people who try it tend to stay.
The angel list is its own signal. The founders of Carousell, PropertyGuru, StashAway, Funding Societies and Nutmeg all put money in - people who built some of Southeast Asia's biggest consumer platforms and presumably have a feel for where consumer behaviour bends next.
06 / THE MOATAnyone can offer a subscription. Few can take the thing back.
The hardest part of Circular's business is the least glamorous. Taking a device back, wiping the data, testing every port and hinge and battery, sanitising it, refurbishing it, and getting it to the next customer at a profit - that is reverse logistics, and it is where these models live or die. A slick website is table stakes. The operational muscle to turn a returned laptop into a fresh subscription six times over is the thing competitors can't copy from a screenshot.
That's also what makes Circular a genuinely circular-economy company rather than a marketing one. When your economics depend on a device surviving six tenants, you start caring about durability, repairability and long life in a way a one-time seller never has to. The incentive and the mission point the same direction.