How startup Zapme helps travellers call home from anywhere
Every international traveller has experienced it: you land in a new country, your phone lights up with a message from your telco.
“Welcome to [insert country]. You’ll be charged $10 per day for roaming.”
You scramble to find an airport kiosk for a local SIM, struggle through unfamiliar interfaces, or give up and rely on patchy hotel Wi-Fi to stay in touch.
Add kids, business meetings, or time-sensitive passwords, and the hassle becomes a serious problem.
Zapme, a new Australian startup built out of this frustration, believes there’s a better way. But to understand how this innovation came to life, you have to meet its founder, Scott King.
From Alice Springs to the World
Scott grew up in Alice Springs. A single television channel and a lot of imagination defined his early years. But even as a kid, he wanted more.
At 17, he left for Sweden as an exchange student. At 19, he was living in the mountains of Japan, where he was the only English speaker in town, and training as a ski instructor, despite being from the desert.
What followed was a wild career path: Miami, cruise ships, welding in the U.S., launching Alaska’s first internet café, managing conventions, and even returning back home to put 15,000 people on ice skates in the middle of summer in Alice Springs.
Across all these roles, one pattern stood out. Scott was always finding creative ways to fix frustrating problems.
Whether it was moving a company from black-and-white paper schedules to a presence on the internet, or pioneering new shore excursions on cruise liners, his mindset stayed consistent: listen, learn, build a better way.
Zapme is the latest result of that mindset.
Scott’s problem with travel (and phones)
In 2020, Scott was living in Switzerland during the early days of COVID.
He had SIM cards from Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK taped to his passport, but couldn’t use any of them effectively.
The roaming costs were outrageous. Logging into bank accounts or crypto wallets was impossible without receiving one-time passwords to an Australian number he’d had to cancel to avoid the $12,000 roaming bill for the year.
Sitting on the banks of Lake Lucerne, locked out of his own digital life, Scott had a moment of vision: “Why can’t this just work?”
We have PayPal for global payments. WhatsApp for instant messaging. Why couldn’t one app handle your numbers, your data, your calls, and your messaging, anywhere in the world?
So he set out to find an answer.
How to build a solution from scratch
Scott isn’t a traditional tech founder. He’s a hospitality guy. A tourism guy. A conference guy.
But when the idea wouldn’t go away, he did what all great entrepreneurs do: he found a way. Because to him, while he’d never written a line of code, this wasn’t about tech, it was simply solving a problem.
And, as he says, “if you can define the problem clearly enough, you can find the right people to build the solution.”
So he pulled together a team (and a co-founder), spread across Adelaide, the Philippines, and Europe. Each brought a different piece of the puzzle, working together to turn a bold idea into something real.
One of the biggest technical challenges was mobile data. Activating an eSIM usually means scanning QR codes, navigating hidden settings, and crossing your fingers.
Zapme’s team wrote custom-built code to embed eSIMs directly into a phone’s operating system. With a single tap, or even just a fingerprint scan, your data plan would be active.
For two years they worked hard until a minimum viable product was built. This first version could do three things really well:
- Hold multiple phone numbers from different countries.
- Let you call and text on those numbers from near anywhere in the world.
- Work even if the other person wasn’t using the app.
Need a U.S. number for a work trip? A UK number for your startup’s London launch? Zapme lets you activate them in minutes, all on your existing phone, with no tiny plastic SIMs and no swapping devices.
Scott knew it was a major first step towards the future.
An app not just for travellers
Zapme began as a way to make life easier for people crossing borders. But it didn’t take long to realise it could solve problems far beyond the airport gate.
For Scott, the use cases kept appearing everywhere he looked.
A friend using a dating app didn’t want to hand out her real number to strangers, so she set up a temporary Zapme line instead, keeping her private life truly private.
A local soccer coach used one number for the season to wrangle messages from parents, then simply switched it off when the final whistle blew.
A recruiter buried under 1,000 applications a week gave candidates a dedicated Zapme work number, so personal texts didn’t get lost in the flood.
This is why he believes that Zapme is a tool for the modern economy and for global citizens.
The companies of the future already span time zones, cultures, and remote teams. Communication shouldn’t be the thing holding them back and Zapme is working to make sure it never does.
The road ahead for Zapme
Zapme is one of those startups you can’t believe didn’t exist already. That’s often the mark of a great idea.
From sailing ships across the Caribbean to running events in the middle of the Outback, Scott’s career has never moved in a straight line.
But every detour taught him something. Each airport layover, mountain trek, and day at sea — all while wrestling with the simple act of making a call — was preparation for building Zapme.
It’s not trying to replace Telstra or Vodafone. It’s simply for anyone who’s ever asked, “Why doesn’t this just work?”
Now, it does.
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