Nick Ramsay has built a company around a familiar piece of domestic archaeology: the old phone in the drawer. It sits beneath cables for devices nobody remembers, carrying a residual value that shrinks while everyone politely ignores it. The object works. The market has simply lost track of it.
Circular, the Singapore company Ramsay co-founded in 2021, proposes a less sentimental relationship with electronics. Subscribe to the phone, laptop, tablet or gaming device. Use it for the period that fits. Return it, extend the subscription or upgrade. When a device comes back, Circular wipes its data, tests its software and hardware, sanitises it and prepares it for another customer. Eventually, when useful life is truly over, the materials can be recycled.
The elegance is easy to describe. The difficult part is everything a customer never sees: risk decisions, residual-value forecasts, logistics, damage protection, careful grading and the little theatre of trust required when a previously used device appears at the door. A circular economy depends on loops, but loops depend on operations.
“Tech people love to focus on solving the hardest problems rather than the most important ones.”Nick Ramsay, 2019
A product career finds a physical problem
Ramsay's route to the return box began in European financial-services consulting. After studying engineering at Imperial College London, he worked at Deloitte from 2005 to 2011, then completed an MBA at INSEAD. His career crossed from strategy into products at a moment when Southeast Asia's digital marketplaces were growing into daily infrastructure.
He founded FloorPlanFinder.com, which PropertyGuru acquired. Ramsay then joined the property marketplace as Head of Product. From 2016 to 2021 he moved through a remarkable stack of responsibilities at MoneySmart Group: chief product officer, chief technology officer and chief operating officer. Those titles cover three different conversations about a company - what to build, how to build it and how to make the whole machine run.
In a 2019 conversation about product culture, he described growing MoneySmart's product-management team from one person to ten in about a year. He spoke about coaching, mentoring and the tension between optimisation and experimentation. His neat distinction between departments still travels well: “Marketing thinks in terms of a fixed budget - Product thinks in terms of a fixed outcome.” The line reveals a preference for the destination over the ritual.
MoneySmart also brought him close to the limits of conventional consumer finance. Ramsay later said that familiar products for consumers and small businesses reinforced a linear economy and old ideas of ownership. Credit might make a new device easier to buy, but it does not decide what happens when that device is no longer new.
The second customer changes everything
Traditional retail celebrates the first unboxing. Circular must care just as much about the second. Its economics improve when the same piece of hardware can serve several people, spreading the cost across subscriptions while preserving enough quality for the next handoff. The company has said its goal is roughly six subscription cycles for each device before recycling.
This changes what “product” means. The website is a product. Approval is a product. Delivery is a product. Refurbishment is a product. Even the return experience is a product, because an awkward return strands inventory just as surely as a broken screen does. Ramsay's operating background suddenly looks less like a résumé and more like a list of prerequisites.
It also changes the sustainability pitch. Circular does not ask customers to stop enjoying premium technology. It asks them to separate access from permanent possession. That matters in a market where a phone can signal taste, progress and status. Ramsay has described the work of changing that habit as “mythbusting”: challenging the assumption that buying and later reselling is always the cheapest route, especially after depreciation, accidental damage and the bother of finding a buyer.
From an Asian first move to a regional test
Circular launched in early 2022 and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Its founding group combined Ramsay with product leader Pantha Roy, logistics operator George Oliver and technology executive Yaniv Bernstein. The company began with subscriptions for high-end electronics and expanded its catalogue across phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, headphones, gaming and virtual reality. It serves individuals and businesses in Singapore and Australia.
By October 2023, Circular said it had grown threefold over the preceding year. It announced a US$7.6 million seed round led by AirTree Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital, Partech, January Capital and several founders from the region. The reported valuation was US$30 million. The company said it would deepen its Singapore offer, accelerate Australia and grow Circular for Business for startups and small companies.
Reported company growth, indexed
Company-reported growth for the twelve months preceding the October 2023 seed announcement.The business customer makes the proposition less philosophical. A young company needs laptops today, would rather preserve cash, and may not know its headcount next year. Device subscriptions turn a capital purchase into a flexible operating cost. Circular has promoted the idea that this can help a team upgrade or contract without leaving hardware idle.
The financing has to follow the hardware. A software subscription can add another account at tiny marginal cost; a device company must put a valuable object in every new customer's hands. Inventory consumes cash before monthly payments recover it. That is why Circular's partnerships and capital structure matter as much as its storefront. The promise of flexibility for subscribers creates a matching obligation for the operator: fund the asset, know where it is, maintain it and keep it earning across several lives.
Convenience is the climate strategy
Ramsay calls himself a strong advocate for the circular economy, but his argument is not built on virtue alone. “By extending the lifespan of products and preventing precious materials from ending up in landfills, we hope to gradually shift patterns of consumption and reduce our collective burden on the environment,” he has said. The sentence begins with a process, not a sermon.
That distinction is commercially useful. Circular's customers can choose among different terms, keep a device longer, upgrade, return it or in some cases buy it. Ramsay has said long subscriptions have outnumbered short ones and that customers sometimes come back for second or third devices. The repeat behaviour matters because it suggests the customer has accepted access as normal rather than as an emergency substitute for buying.
Refurbished technology carries its own burden of proof. A circular brand cannot merely insist that second-life products are worthy. It has to make their condition predictable. Circular's public values emphasise reliability, transparency and exacting refurbishment standards. Those words become meaningful only when a battery, screen and delivery slot behave as promised.
The company also has to balance flexibility with the mathematics of ownership. A three-month subscriber and a two-year subscriber create different costs. Damage cover, late returns and uncertain resale values complicate the clean loop drawn on a slide. Circular's real invention is therefore not the subscription, which is old, but the coordination of finance, customer experience and reverse logistics around a depreciating object.
“It is clear that we are right at the start of a new consumption paradigm driven by the subscription and the circular economy.”Nick Ramsay, 2023
The return journey is the business
There is a quiet continuity in Ramsay's work. FloorPlanFinder made property information easier to use. PropertyGuru organised a marketplace. MoneySmart helped people navigate financial products. Circular organises another confusing exchange: who should use a device next, what condition it is in, and what that next period of use should cost.
His public writing in 2025 and 2026 has kept returning to focus and leverage. He celebrated Circular crossing US$300,000 in annual recurring revenue per employee, framing the milestone around a small team and targeted use of technology. More recently, he pointed to subscription moves by Apple and Samsung as validation that access is moving closer to the centre of consumer electronics. He also signalled forthcoming partnerships and international expansion.
The larger companies may help normalise the behaviour. Circular's challenge is to remain useful when the idea no longer feels unusual. Its answer appears to be infrastructure: an operating system through which manufacturers, merchants, telecommunications companies and marketplaces can offer subscriptions, recover devices and monetise their remaining value.
For Ramsay, the old phone in the drawer is not only waste. It is evidence of a poorly designed ending. Circular gives that ending somewhere to go. The customer gets the new thing. The old thing gets another user. And a business grows in the handoff, where retail once left a blank space.