This Ex-Palantir Exec Built A $900 Million Privacy-First Cell Network |
John Doyle has his share of doubters. As a former executive at $350 billion surveillance juggernaut Palantir, it’s hard for some to believe he’s building Cape, a new mobile network that’s entirely privacy-first. But Doyle says Cape is neither a front for Palantir nor a honeypot for law enforcement. It’s the opposite: a telecom company that provides calls, texting and data for $99 a month, but won’t sell your data, track your location, or leave you open to surveillance like traditional operators do.
But Doyle and cofounder Nicholas Espinoza, another Palantir alum, had no trouble convincing Silicon Valley investors to get on board. On Thursday, Cape announced a $100 million round co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and IVP, bringing overall funding to $190 million. Previous investors include Andreessen Horowitz and A* Capital. It’s now hit a $900 million valuation, and revenue has exploded from $4.5 million in 2024 to $37 million in 2025. Though Cape doesn’t name its customers, saying it's part of its approach to privacy, previous reports said it had been trialled with the U.S. Navy. The company told Forbes it currently has 31 government contracts, as it seeks to help defense and intelligence agencies avoid data leakage via traditional carriers.
Doyle, a U.S. Army Special Forces veteran who worked with intelligence agencies at Palantir, is hoping Cape will upend a telecom industry that is rife with cybersecurity problems. Take the Salt Typhoon attacks of 2024, where a Chinese cyber espionage group broke into AT&T and Verizon to snoop on the communications of U.S. politicians, including vice president JD Vance.
“You can't solve digital and privacy writ large without addressing this big hole that is the cellular network layer.” John Doyle, cofounder and CEO at Cape
“You can't solve digital and privacy writ large without addressing this big hole that is the cellular network layer.”
There are other, more insidious weaknesses. When a user travels and has to switch networks, companies that sell surveillance as a product to nation states can set up telecom infrastructure that makes them look like a legitimate network provider, while they spy on user locations, calls and texts. They can do that simply because the original telecom provider hasn’t verified their legitimacy.
Then there’s SIM swapping attacks, where a hacker tricks a customer service rep into transferring a customer’s number over to their device to intercept one-time passcodes and take over linked accounts, are costly: in 2025, T-Mobile paid a $33 million settlement to a person who’d lost $38 million in cryptocurrency after a SIM swap hack. ICE and other investigative agencies can also use surveillance devices like Stingrays to locate phones via their International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number. In some cases, telecom providers also directly sell user data to an opaque data broker industry.
Cape claims to have an answer to all these problems. It deletes call logs after one day. It promises never to collect personal data like names or social security numbers. To protect against surveillance companies posing as providers, Cape verifies that phone coordinates match the location of the network being used.. And if Cape users want to move their number over to a new device, they need to present a unique 24-word phrase provided to them on signup. IMSI numbers are also regularly rotated to prevent Stingray snooping.
“We’re building a product that really needed to exist in the world,” Doyle tells Forbes. “You can't solve digital and privacy writ large without addressing this big hole that is the cellular network layer.”
Somesh Dash, who led IVP’s investment into Cape, says the startup has an opportunity to become a multi-billion-dollar revenue business within a decade, given the massive total addressable market of privacy-conscious mobile users, estimated to be worth between $30 billion and $40 billion. “This is so overdue, because the telecom stack hasn't really innovated,” Dash says.
As much as Doyle is critical of the industry, he still has to work with it. While Cape has control over how its network operates, as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), it uses the wires and towers of UScellular, both an operator and an infrastructure provider, which was acquired for $4.4 billion by T-Mobile in 2025. As a result, it’s open to some forms of surveillance.
A classic network wiretap could be used to spy on Cape customers, for instance. A government could also order Cape to provide customer metadata, such as who contacts whom and when, a common surveillance technique known as a pen register. Its policy is to challenge any law enforcement request “that is not narrowly tailored.” iPhone users can get some text message encryption via Cape, but its “last mile” encryption only protects messages as they travel from the cellular base station to the phone, opening up avenues for surveillance.
But because it’s an MVNO, Cape can still improve security for anyone on UScellular’s network, says Karsten Nohl, a cybersecurity researcher who has spent over a decade looking into telecoms vulnerabilities. He says that by working with partners to configure their shared network, Cape could encourage others running over UScellular to up their security controls.
“These controls are readily available for all operators and yet many seem to lack a financial incentive to put them into place. That’s the main difference Cape could make for the ecosystem: generating revenue specifically tied to protection,” Nohl adds.
If Cape can steal customers from the big players, it might be another incentive for those companies to improve their security. “What Cape is doing is offering a real, viable, credible alternative,” Doyle says. “We're a long way from stealing noticeable market share from Verizon, but the growth isn't slowing.”