Okay, so when you open Tectonic, you might not expect to be reading about a mobile carrier, but hear us out.
Yesterday, “privacy-first” carrier Cape raised a chill $100M led by Bain Capital Ventures and IVP, with participation from new investors including 01 Advisors, 137 Ventures, Definition, and Fifth Down Capital.
And here’s why we care: The company has built a mobile carrier designed from the ground up to protect the privacy of people operating in secure environments. Like, say, government and military professionals, or those working with them.
“Cell phone networks track everywhere you go, every app you use, every person you call or text,” John Doyle, CEO of Cape, said in a statement. “So when they’re compromised, it leads to some of the most sweeping and damaging violations of both national security and individual privacy in history.”
Sounds like someone got at least a little freaked out by Signalgate. 👊🇺🇸🔥.
Loophole: Cape doesn’t sit solely in defense tech land, but it sure as hell has a bunch of applicability to all you dudes and dudettes.
The company grew out of a pretty simple (and scary) problem: Basically, all of the (very precious) data that passes through our phones is v v vulnerable in the current carrier setup. Just ask the Russians.
- The company was founded back in 2022 by CEO John Doyle (former head of national security at Palantir) and Nicholas Espinoza (also ex-Palantir). Guess there’s no better place to learn about how vulnerable our personal data is than, well, Palantir.
- The idea is to make your phone harder to track, hack, or surveil, and it is designed for the security-conscious: Military and government officials, journalists, execs in highly sensitive industries, you get the idea.
- The company has raised a total of about $192M from backers, including Andreessen Horowitz, Forward Deployed VC, and Point72 Ventures.
Rebuild: Rather than using a software bandaid to address privacy concerns, the company has rejiggered mobile carrier infrastructure from the ground up.
- The company operates as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and uses existing carrier networks for coverage.
- But here’s the twist: It routes all that sweet, sweet personal data through Cape’s cloud-based mobile core. That protects users from the vulnerabilities of the traditional tower network.
- The company says it collects minimal data from users and employs rotating identifiers, which makes it harder for phones to be tracked.
- Users can also use multiple numbers on the same SIM. Sneaky.
- It also has automatically encrypted SMS and voicemail so, like, people can’t listen in.
- Last year, they launched a $99/month plan and partnered with other, fun encryption companies like Proton.
- The company basically pitches itself as the “holy grail” of mobile privacy for defense users—they say you can’t be tracked, or tapped, or interfered with.
Beware the CCP: In the release announcing the raise, the company invoked Salt Typhoon—the ongoing cyber espionage campaign linked to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), which reportedly managed to tap the phones of US officials, including President Donald Trump and VP JD Vance.
“Nearly every government agency, enterprise, or consumer in the United States gets their cell phone service from one of three main mobile carriers that resell their services to dozens of smaller brands,” Cape wrote in its statement.
Scale up: This investment will help the company further scale its privacy infrastructure as it expands nationwide and “speed adoption across government, businesses, and consumers, while supporting further research and development,” the company said.
“This is an investment in deep infrastructure that secures the connectivity backbone of our mobile economy and way of life,” Somesh Dash, General Partner at IVP, said in a statement. “By building a new telco with its own software stack, rather than just reselling the service of incumbents, Cape is the only credible alternative to the traditional carriers.”