Circles Aspire’s Sanjay Kaul told attendees that MVNOs must look beyond core connectivity.

• MVNOs increasingly run the risk of seeting their business commoditised
• Diversification strategies need to be tailored to local market realities
• AI has the potential to help MVNOs avoid the commoditisation trap

Telecom operators are under tremendous commercial pressure, with commoditisation of core services that are universally being replaced by third-party apps such as WhatsApp and other messaging services. That means that MVNOs need to diversify to survive, according to Sanjay Kaul, Chief Revenue Officer of MVNE Circles Aspire, who delivered a keynote address From Startup to Standout – Building and Scaling a Winning MVNO Brand Circles Aspire’s founders, who came from the venture capital world rather than the mobile operator business, initially sought to create a disruptive service provider on their own over a decade ago. Finding that existing OSS, BSS and CRM solutions fell short of what they required, they decide to invest in their own tech stack over a two-year period ahead of launching their own MVNO.

Delivering a keynote on scaling a winning MVNO brand at MVNO Nation Live, Kaul told attendees that this investment delivered a full telco back-end stack complemented by a “kick-ass digital app – probably the best in the world”. Circles then launched virtual operator businesses in various markets, starting with Singapore and following up with launches in Australia, Taiwan and Indonesia.

Following investment by Warburg Pincus, which became the company’s majority shareholder, Circles switched focus from launching more consumer-facing services to launching as a B2B provider – Circles Aspire – based on the strength of its tech stack.

Kaul told attendees that Circles Aspire was not a classic vendor but chose to participate in the businesses of its client base, delivering its stack for a combination of platform fee and revenue share. “We are seen as a partner, not a vendor,” he said.

Testing ground

Kaul said the company’s ongoing involvement as a service provider gave it a unique perspective on what works and what doesn’t. He cited the example of the Singapore Circles Life service it operates as a testing ground.

“This is a very competitive market. In a country with one of the highest GDPs globally, ARPUs are now down to US$7 or US$8, with Circles Life among the highest – more than Singtel,” he said. In Singapore, Circles Life operates a fully app-based service with no call centre operation that allows it to keep costs down. Recently the MVNO launched a cashback rewards programme called Circles Zerofy, where users earn cashback by making purchases on the service via preferred partners. The cashback can be sued to offset or reduce monthly phone bills, allowing the operator to pitch this to reduce your phone bill to zero.

“If I’m booking an Uber or a Grab [the local rival to Uber] or Nike shoes or something on Amazon…at the end of the month I can get maybe S$10 back. We can connect a partner in a few lines of code – an SDK – that creates that embedded connectivity. It’s extremely powerful,” said Kaul.

Other tough markets in which Circles Life has participated in the launch of services include Pakistan (where volumes are high but ARPU is minimal), where he said its service (Onic) had managed to achieve ARPU two and a half times the local average, and Japan, where it has been involved in the launch of a “true digital service” in the form of KDDI Digital Life-owned online-only mobile brand povo, which, Kaul reported, now had close to three million customers and regularly achieved high NPS.

“The key is that we are going beyond a core connectivity service and that’s how we can make a difference for the telco industry,” said Kaul.

OpenAI partnership

Kaul said that Circles was taking its proposition to the next level with AI. The company had previously struck a global partnership with OpenAI, and Kaul’s presentation at MVNO Nation Live came three months after the Japanese launch of povo AI, the built-in GenAI platform of the Japanese MVNO.

Kaul said Circles Aspire had broken down an 18-month roadmap for operators focusing on the develop of front-end AI-powered applications.

“All of our focus is really on customer lifetime value and the customer value proposition. How do you build up the NPS? How do you enable customer retention? How do you create stickiness where the consumer feels no need to go to any other app?” he said. “Your app should be the super app. That’s the magic you can create for a telco.”

As a promotional video played by Kaul at the event illustrated, Circles Aspire is intent on helping telcos tap AI to avoid the trap of becoming “functional but forgettable” basic utilities. The company has branded its AI-native innovation engine ‘Explore’, built in partnership with OpenAI, which it claims has the power to transform a digital telco app into a truly personalised offering.

According to Circles, Explore has the power to reactivate dormant subscribers through targeted games, upgrade lower-value customers through rewards and deepen the loyalty of others through the deployment of personalised AI assistants. The company cited data that the engine had driven a 156% uplift in app usage, 5% reduction in churn, 12% growth in ARPU and a fivefold increase in AI feature adoption compared with other apps, along with improved NPS.

Circles Aspire says Explore can be integrated in less than four weeks, enabling operators to go to market with these value-enhancing features more quickly.

According to Kaul, the pure-play telco space is “just the start” of its deployment of the technology stack it has developed and fine-tuned. He said the ‘digital CX full stack’ that Circles Aspire has developed could in time be applied to a range of other verticals.

“In Japan, with povo, it was build, operate, transform – we deployed the full stack. The only thing povo uses from KDDI Group is its network – everything else is in the stack.”

Kaul says that talking to telco industry executives highlighted the ambition many had to transform into technology companies. However, he said a huge digital transformation programme had been underway for years that had so far failed to produce much of a tangible outcome.

“We’re a very nimble operators coming out of Singapore and our idea is to bring that agility to the mix,” he said.

This is one chapter from Beyond Connectivity: The Future of MVNOs, our eBook covering insights from MVNO Nation Live 2025.

Want the full picture? Download the complete eBook here

Want to be part of the conversation? Join us at MVNO Nation Europe 2026, 3-5 November in Alicante, Spain, where many of the voices featured in this eBook return to explore these themes in person.