About Nopaque

    Built by two people who have seen this fail before.

    Phil and Steve spent the last two decades inside contact-centre transformation and cloud delivery. Same projects, same patterns, same gaps. Nopaque is what they wish they'd had every time a regression made it to production over the phone.

    The story so far

    Two paths, one workshop.

    2003
    Steve
    Digital + Microsoft HQ, US
    OpenVMS, Windows Operating Systems, SQL Server, and various tooling for large enterprise platforms.
    Phil
    Contact-centre tech support agent
    Early IT career. Took the calls, escalated the tickets, learned the shape of the failures from the inside.
    2008
    2012
    Steve
    Back to the UK, joins the cloud pioneer wave
    Cloudreach, then Nordcloud, the flagship AWS consultancies of the day. Full-stack delivery on a decade of cloud projects.
    Phil
    Discovers Amazon Connect
    A colleague shows him the platform; he builds a consultancy around it. Implementations across UK banks, building societies, and dozens of other organisations.
    2015
    2017
    Phil & Steve · the workshop
    Overlap at Nordcloud UK
    They build out Nordcloud UK together early on. Over the next few years they keep saying they should start something together.
    2019
    Steve
    Builds a bank from scratch in Hong Kong
    Then back into UK finance at Barclays. The "build a real platform end-to-end" muscle.
    Phil
    Spots the testing & observability gap
    Leading engineering on a large implementation, he notices change validation is lacking and incumbents aren't operating in an on-demand, cloud-ready way. He lobbies; nothing meaningful changes over a two-year tenure.
    2022
    2025
    ▸ Nopaque is founded
    "Today is the day we build it."
    Phil and Steve start Nopaque together. TotalPath becomes the first product, voice testing, mapping, load, and compliance assurance for the next generation of contact centres.
    The co-founders

    Phil and Steve.

    PS

    Phil Smith

    Co-founder

    Started in contact centres as a tech-support agent, built an Amazon Connect consultancy after a decade in IT, and implemented it across UK banks, building societies, and dozens of other organisations. Connects the right technologies and people to solve operational pain.

    What kept plaguing him: organisations say they want to improve customer experience, but the underlying drive is cost-saving through cloud. That's not what good CX looks like. And testing for the voice channel? Stuck in the previous decade.

    Today: running Nopaque commercially. Founder-led calls with every customer. Author of the field notes you'll find on the blog.
    SM

    Steve Mew

    Co-founder

    Started at Digital and Microsoft HQ in the US working on OS and database internals. Moved into .NET / SQL Server consultancy, built high-frequency, low-latency trading systems in Australia and Malta, then joined the pioneer wave of cloud at Cloudreach and Nordcloud.

    A stint building a bank from scratch in Hong Kong, then Barclays in the UK. He and Phil first worked together early at Nordcloud UK. The "let's build something together" conversation finally happened.

    Today: heads platform engineering on TotalPath. The "make it actually scale per-second on the cloud" half of the founding pair.
    Why now

    Three trends, one workshop.

    Nopaque started when these three landed in the same calendar quarter.

    01 · REGULATORY

    EU AI Act lands

    Article 50 transparency obligations on AI voice agents go live 2 August 2026. Most teams running them have never done formal compliance testing, and most of the incumbent tools never had compliance in scope.

    02 · TECHNICAL

    AI agents on the phone line

    The "press 1 for sales" IVR is being replaced by an LLM that decides its own routing. The failure modes are different. The testing tools that worked for DTMF trees don't.

    03 · COMMERCIAL

    Capacity-planned testing is obsolete

    Contact centres are moving to per-call billing for the channel they serve. The testing tooling is still selling annual peak capacity. That arbitrage closes.

    When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
    John Muir

    Customer experience isn't a department. The voice channel isn't a silo. The compliance report isn't a deliverable. They're hitched. Clarity matters, on the call, in the report, in how we work with you.

    Let's build clearer experiences together

    Talk to one of us.

    Founder-led conversations, no SDR funnel. Or try the product first, the platform is self-serve.

    Start free