Why we built Olatti

People ask why a telecoms company that was already working would stop and build its own software from scratch. It's a fair question. We had customers, engineers, a network. We didn't need the headache.

So here's the honest answer to why we built Olatti. The biggest cost in a small business isn't the conversations that go badly. It's the conversations that never happen: the message you didn't send, the call you didn't make because you'd have to find the number, find the app, find the moment. After fifteen years in UK telecoms, that's the problem we set out to remove. The longer story is how we got there, and it starts with me being told no.

The future I could see, and the no

In the early 2010s I worked at a phone-system reseller, selling traditional PBXs that bolted to the wall. Big boxes, copper lines, an engineer in a van for every change.

I could see where it was going. The calls were moving to the internet, the box on the wall was about to become software, and the whole leasing model underneath it was living on borrowed time. I asked the owners to pivot to cloud. They said no. Not because they couldn't see it too, but because the leasing economics paid the bills, and you don't walk away from the thing paying the bills.

I understood the logic. I just couldn't unsee the future.

Fired, then starting again from a phone book

So I started something on the side with a colleague. I got found out, and I got sacked.

That was the sink-or-swim moment. No customers, no platform, no safety net, just a phone and a list of numbers. I went back to telemarketing from scratch, the same way anyone starts in this industry, by ringing strangers and getting hung up on until one of them says yes.

It's not a glamorous origin. But it taught me the part of telecoms that no software teaches you: how a small business actually decides to trust a phone provider, and how easily that trust gets spent.

Building on borrowed ground

I set up circle.cloud in 2015. A few years in, the firm that had let me go went under, because somewhere along the way it stopped looking after its customers. Their best salesperson, Graham, came to join us. Our revenue grew tenfold in his first year, and he's run the business as CEO since.

We scaled the thing that worked: telemarketers, field sales, real engineers, support that picks up. We resold Broadworks, then moved to PBXware in 2017 when Broadworks got too expensive and too feature-locked.

And by 2018, we hit a wall. Not a sales wall, a product one. When a customer needed something the platform didn't do, we couldn't build it. We didn't own the source code. We could configure what someone else had decided to make, and nothing more. We were renting the most important part of our business.

That's the trap with building on borrowed ground. It works right up until the day your customer needs the one thing you can't give them.

The napkin that made us a software company

Then someone joined us almost by accident. A genuinely brilliant engineer who'd built real applications before. He listened to me complain about the ceiling for about a week, then sat me down and said, you need an API. He sketched the rough architecture of our own platform on a napkin: the pieces that would have to exist for us to control our own product.

That napkin is the moment everything changed. We've accidentally become a software company.

The platform we started sketching that day is what became Olatti, built by We UC, the company behind the product and the parent of circle.cloud. Today that's a 20-person dev team working alongside the engineers, QAs and infrastructure people across circle.cloud's 100-plus. We write our own source code. We run our own network and our own UK data centres. The voice, the transcription and the call summaries all run on our own infrastructure, not handed off to a third-party AI provider in another country.

The byproduct of owning every layer is simple: the buck stops with us. When something breaks, the customer calls us, and we fix it. We're not waiting on a provider three companies away to get round to it.

The thing we finally understood

Owning the whole stack let us ask a better question than "what feature is missing?" It let us ask "what's actually slowing people down?"

The answer surprised me. It wasn't bandwidth or call quality or features. It was the pause. The half-second of overhead before any conversation: do I open Teams, send an email, pick up the phone, which app, which number, where did we leave off. Multiply that hesitation across a whole team across a whole year and it's enormous. And it shows up in no feature comparison anywhere.

Communication software has spent twenty years adding ways to communicate and almost no time removing the hesitation before communication happens. That's the gap.

There's a reason I wear black every day. Every choice you take out of your morning is a choice you don't have to spend. We're doing the same thing to the conversation: take out the decisions wrapped around it, and what's left is just talking to the person you needed to talk to.

Who we built Olatti for

Olatti is built for founder-operators and the busy people who run small and mid-sized businesses, the ones who treat keyboard shortcuts as default and the mouse as a fallback. People with taste, who can feel when a tool was made carefully and when it was just assembled.

It isn't built for everyone, and we're honest about that. We don't chase enterprise procurement or logos, and we don't compete on being the cheapest line that rings. Those customers aren't wrong. They're just not who we get up to build for.

What they get is the thing the napkin made possible: a keyboard-enabled business phone where you double-tap to summon it, type a name, and press enter to call, from inside whatever you were already working in. I've made the fuller case for a keyboard-first phone separately. Communication at the speed of thought. Or put plainly: stop managing your tools, and just have the conversation.

Fifteen years, one firing and a napkin to get here. We think it was worth it.

If that's the kind of business phone you've been quietly wishing for, join the waitlist and we'll keep you in the loop as we open it up.