About the Founder

Circles was founded by Samantha Dee, (aka SomersetSam), largely because she looked at the existing world of adult connection and thought, surely we can do better than this.

By day, Samantha is holding down a 25 year career as a Senior Technical Test Engineer, which means she has spent years professionally finding things that don’t work properly and asking awkward questions about why. It turns out this is an alarmingly useful skill when building a website.

Circles grew from a simple idea: adults should have somewhere intelligent, safe and genuinely enjoyable to meet other adults without being treated like either hopeless romantics or creatures lurking behind net curtains in questionable underwear.

The result is a platform designed particularly with grown-up connection in mind. Less swiping like you’re choosing a takeaway, less sleaze, fewer unsolicited anatomical surprises and considerably more emphasis on real people, verification, privacy, respect and fun.

Samantha believes getting older should make life more interesting, not gradually reduce the list of things you’re apparently allowed to want. Circles is built around that philosophy: curiosity is healthy, desire does not have an expiry date, and adults are perfectly capable of defining relationships and connections on their own terms.

She is also responsible for Circles’ slightly irreverent personality, because apparently even policies about consent and data protection don’t have to sound as though they were written inside a filing cabinet.

When she isn’t building Circles, Samantha can usually be found lifting heavy things at the gym, writing books (five so far, several to go), testing technology or having another idea for Circles approximately seven minutes after promising herself she has finished for the day.

She never does…

View my Tech Blog, ‘Behind the Scenes’ to see what’s happening under the hood here.