About: Airalo is the world’s first eSIM store, giving travelers affordable mobile data across 200+ countries and regions without a physical SIM card.
Industry: Travel connectivity (eSIM)
Location: Global, fully remote
Size: 400+ employees

Summary: Airalo’s team is fully remote and spread across dozens of countries and time zones. The People team uses Donut to make connection easy and opt-in. Intros, Watercooler, and Celebrations run quietly in Slack, and the results show up where they matter most: in new working relationships, faster starts for new joiners, and at least one project that exists because two teammates were paired for a chat.

 

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A global team that runs on connection

Airalo is in the business of keeping people connected. As the world’s first eSIM store, the company helps travelers get online the moment they land, anywhere in the world. Its own team works the way it wants its customers to travel: from anywhere. Every Airalo teammate is remote, and together they cover nearly every time zone on the map.

Galia Davimes, Airalo’s Remote Experience Manager, leads the programs that keep the team connected to each other. Her perspective was shaped before Airalo, back when she worked on-site in customer support and found that even a shared office can silo people by department.

“As Airalo grew globally, it became clear that we needed creative and meaningful ways to stay connected. There’s a common misconception that remote culture can just be left to chance. Remote work gives such incredible freedom, but connection doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be designed.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo

 

The challenge: connection doesn’t happen by accident

In an office, people run into each other at the coffee pot or on the way to a meeting. Those small, unplanned moments are how most workplace relationships start. On remote teams, that doesn’t happen without intentional effort.

The team at Airalo loves the freedom and flexibility of their fully remote workplace, but Galia knows there are risks too. Remote work can be isolating, and it can create silos: without intervention communication narrows to the people you already work with, and everyone else stays a name in a Slack channel. For a company that wants big ideas and cross-functional thinking, that kind of distance has a real cost.

At the same time, Airalo didn’t want to create “mandatory fun.” The team wanted to create a low-stress opportunity for connection to grow organically for anyone who wanted it, without adding pressure for employees or admin work for the People team.

 

Why Donut: low effort, fully optional

Donut fit two things Airalo cared about. It lives in Slack, where the team already works, and it runs largely on its own.

For a People team supporting a fast-growing global organization, manually pairing people, keeping track of birthdays, and remembering to post prompts would be a job in itself. Donut takes that off their plate.

“I love that it’s fully automated. I rarely have to do anything on the administrative side. When you’re managing a rapidly growing team across 60 countries, the logistics of manually pairing people up would be a full-time job. Because the software handles the heavy lifting, it frees me up to focus on the things that actually need a human touch. It turns us from administrators into community builders.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo

Just as important, Donut matched Airalo’s culture of autonomy. Every program is opt-in, and Galia is deliberate about keeping it that way.

“For me, it’s about how you facilitate connection rather than force it. I’m really not a fan of forced fun. Sometimes when you make it a requirement, it loses its magic. Some people get the connection they need outside of work. We want to respect that people have autonomy over their day. Donut is our tool to facilitate the connection if you want it.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo

 

How Airalo uses Donut

Airalo runs three Donut programs inside Slack: Intros, Watercooler, and Celebrations.

Intros. Every couple of weeks, teammates who opt in are paired for a casual chat with no set agenda. Airalo intentionally does not segment those pairings by department or location, so the program keeps introducing people who wouldn’t otherwise cross paths.

“Part of the beauty of Donut is that you get to talk with people outside of your usual bubble, even someone from a different continent. In one call you could be solving a product blind spot, and the next you’re getting a glimpse into a teammate’s life halfway across the world.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo

Watercooler. Airalo runs Watercooler in a general channel the team calls Airport Lounge, a lightweight space for non-work conversation. Rather than relying on default prompt packs, Galia writes questions tailored to her team. She takes into consideration what people talk about in Airalo’s social channels, looks for topics that reach different interests and generations, and adjusts based on what lands.

Throwbacks are a reliable hit. So is a recurring prompt asking teammates what one question they’d put to the whole company, with the submissions running later as credited “sponsored” questions. One teammate’s contribution became an instant favorite by reviving the internet’s longest-running Titanic debate: was there really no room for Jack on that floating door? The whole company had opinions.

That effort shows up in the results. Galia has noticed engagement climb when the questions are written for Airalo specifically rather than pulled off the shelf.

Celebrations. Birthdays run automatically through Celebrations, so no one gets missed and the People team doesn’t have to track dates by hand. Birthday posts reliably draw a wave of messages from across the team.

Airalo teammates show up for their programs consistently and engage with enthusiasm.Since launching Donut, people at Airalo have connected in 2,231 intros. In the past year alone, they engaged 454 times with 78 custom watercooler prompts and sent 5,669 birthday wishes.

Those numbers include people at every level. Charlie, Airalo’s VP of People, is one of the program’s most consistent participants:

“At Airalo, our whole mission is centred around keeping people connected. These chats are a great reminder that connection goes beyond the product we build; it’s a big part of how we actually work together. In a fully remote setup, it’s exactly what helps me feel genuinely connected to the team.”
Charlie Smethurst, VP of People, Airalo

 

What connection looks like in practice

Participation numbers tell part of the story, but Galia believes the fuller picture lives in what people do after they meet. That’s where the evidence keeps turning up.

A Donut chat that became a project. Two teammates, Claudio and Daniele, were paired for an Intro and started comparing notes on AI experiments they were each running. It turned out Daniele’s side project was close to something Claudio’s team was already exploring. They brought Daniele into the team’s discussions, and a new project grew out of it.

A tool the team asked to bring to their offsite. When Airalo began planning an in-person retreat, teammates asked to use Donut pairings there too. For Galia, that request was one of the clearest signals that the program is working.

“When your team asks to bring a digital tool into your physical, face-to-face time together, it’s no longer a program that the People Team set up. It becomes how they naturally want to bond. It means it’s enjoyed.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo

Connections that outlast the call. One pairing led two teammates, Nesar and Luis, to meet up in person while Luis was traveling through the Balkans, ending in a go-kart race in Pristina, Kosovo.

“I connected with Luis through Donut, and a month later we were kart racing in Kosovo while he was exploring the Balkans.” — Nesar
“Nesar was a super host. In fact, the main reason I went to Kosovo was because of all the nice things he told me about it.” — Luis

 

Meetings people refuse to miss. In Egypt, an Intro chain turned into a small in-person community. Nada was paired with a colleague, met up with her and a third teammate, and later matched with a fourth team member. When their scheduled call landed on a day Nada unexpectedly spent waiting in line at the bank, she took the meeting anyway, reconnecting through a spotty signal until it worked. The group is already planning their next get-together. 

A faster start for new joiners. Airalo also sees Donut help during onboarding. Meeting someone outside their own team early on helps new hires feel part of the group before their first in-person event.

“When you have a new team member in a new, unfamiliar space and they don’t know anyone yet, being able to jump on a call with someone helps them feel part of a group much quicker. Instead of feeling like an outsider, it integrates them a little faster.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo

 

Both sides of the pairing

Galia spends her working hours designing connection for other people. She’s also a happy end user. Some of her favorite Donut calls involve no work talk at all.

“I’ve had Donut calls where we hit it off so well that we started meeting regularly afterwards, and work has never come up. I honestly couldn’t tell you what their job title is. It’s a great reminder that we’re more than our job titles. We’re just humans with interesting lives.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo

 

The takeaway

Airalo’s approach shows that connection on a distributed team can be intentional without being mandatory. The People team designs the conditions for people to meet, then lets employees choose when and how to take part. Donut handles the logistics, which leaves Galia free to work on what she calls the human element: writing better questions, noticing what resonates with different corners of the company, and turning administrators into community builders.

The proof shows up in a project that started with a coffee chat, a team that asked to bring the tool to their offsite, and colleagues continents apart who now consider each other friends.

“What connection means to me and what it means to you are different things. Donut is simply there to facilitate it, if you want it.”
Galia Davimes, Remote Experience Manager, Airalo