Neel
Popat

Land in a new country and the ritual is always the same. Phone hunts for a signal. A text arrives warning you that data now costs more than the hotel. You buy a local SIM, or a travel eSIM, or you just switch the phone to airplane mode and pretend you meant to disappear. Neel Popat thinks that ritual is a bug, and Popcorn is his fix.

Popcorn is a software-first telco built around a single, almost suspiciously simple promise: one plan, unlimited talk, text and data, across more than 180 countries, with no roaming fees and no contracts. Activation runs on eSIM and takes about five minutes. You can port your old number or take a new one. The pitch is less cheaper minutes and more your phone should never make you think about it again.

As CEO and co-founder, Popat is selling something carriers have spent decades making complicated. The legacy telco business model runs on confusion - tiers, overages, the panic at passport control. Popcorn runs the other way: flat, borderless, boring in the best sense. Underneath the simplicity sits the ambitious part, an AI-native layer with automated call handling, call screening and summaries, and security features aimed at the new threats of SIM-swap fraud and deepfakes.

It is a big swing from a small word. He named the company Popcorn - light, cheap, a little fun - for connectivity meant to feel effortless. The work behind it is anything but. Building a telco means wrangling carrier partnerships, regulation, and hardware compatibility while still shipping the kind of product people actually enjoy. Popat has done the hard version before. He keeps signing up for it.

Pinner, North London. A British-Indian household where education came first. At thirteen, Popat coded a message board from his bedroom and called it "What You Sayin." It spread the way teenage internet things spread - fast, messy, a little chaotic. It became a playground "hot or not," picked up coverage in The Guardian, and then collapsed under its own popularity when schools started asking parents to keep their kids off it. He shut it down.

It was a failure with a lesson stapled to it. He had built something people could not put down. That feeling - of making a thing the world reacts to - never fully left him, even when his career pointed somewhere far more respectable.

He studied Mathematics and Statistics at the London School of Economics and graduated with First Class Honours. The path to finance was less a plan than an accident: a pre-university internship at Rothschild during the 2007 boom turned into a job offer, and, as he tells it, he "fell into finance." What followed was roughly a decade as an investment professional - Rothschild, Graphite Capital, European Capital (later part of Ares), and a stint as a venture investor in New York.

On paper, it was working. The compensation was good. The titles were good. And he was quietly miserable. The maths prodigy who once shut down his own viral website was now optimizing spreadsheets for other people's bets.

Late 2017. Crypto was on every headline and Popat's friends kept asking the finance guy what to buy. Around the same time, he met an entrepreneur pitching a $10 million emoji-sticker business - a man who had previously run a fried-chicken chain. Popat looked at him and asked himself the question that detonated his comfortable life: had this guy over-performed, or had Popat underperformed?

He chose the uncomfortable answer. In March 2018 he joined the Berlin cohort of Entrepreneur First, the talent investor that backs people before they have a company or even a co-founder. There he met his co-founder and built Donut, a consumer app to make crypto investing feel less like a heist and more like a habit - a diversified digital-asset portfolio you could set up in under five minutes, gamified so normal people would actually stick with it.

Donut raised venture money - backers included Redalpine, Heartcore Capital and Possible Ventures - and Popat was named to Bessemer's first cohort of web3 founders. The thesis was democratized access: everyone, regardless of geography or net worth, deserving the same financial tools. For a while, it worked.

Then the market did what markets do. And the real test of Popat as a founder turned out to have nothing to do with growth charts.

Spend a decade inside investment funds and you either learn to love the noise or learn to tune it out. Popat chose tuning out. His investing advice, sharpened during the Donut years, reads less like a hedge-fund memo and more like a gym routine: start small - you do not need ten thousand dollars to begin; automate the boring parts so emotion never gets a vote; diversify across asset classes rather than betting the house on one story; borrow only for things that appreciate; and reward yourself when you save, because habits need applause to survive.

It is a worldview built for the long game, which is exactly why short-term panic finds no purchase. When the pandemic hit and everyone was glued to red screens, his read was blunt and humane at once: people were not gracefully "working from home" - they were stuck at home during a crisis trying to work, and that distinction mattered. The advice was to step back, automate, and let time do the heavy lifting.

Underneath it all sits a stoic streak. He keeps Marcus Aurelius close, and the line he returns to - "seek the tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Only what you do" - is as much a founder's survival tool as a philosophy. It is the kind of thing you need when your company's fate is tangled in someone else's bankruptcy proceedings and the only honorable move is the expensive one.

That same discipline shapes how he builds product. Popcorn launched with a design partner he praised in unusually plain terms - "the best 0-to-1 product designer you'll ever meet" - and a co-founder, Lukas Kairys, on the technical side. The team is small and the surface is friendly, but the ambition is to do to telecom what set-and-forget did to investing: remove the anxiety, automate the friction, and make the right thing the default.