A privacy-centric cellphone carrier called Cape is now officially available across the United States, offering a unique set of features to protect users from surveillance and identity theft.
Many cellphone users already use virtual private networks, encrypted messaging apps, and secure password managers to help keep their data safe. But those tools can’t always protect against security issues with the underlying cell network itself, and other phone companies don’t typically compete on privacy, says Cape CEO John Doyle.
“Before we built Cape, there was not an obvious differentiated choice in the network space,” Doyle says.
But Cape, founded in 2022, is designed to protect customers from privacy risks like SIM swapping, where a cellphone number is transferred to a new phone without the owner’s permission to intercept sensitive messages like authentication codes, and IMSI catchers, which snoop on phone users by impersonating legitimate cell towers and monitoring the unique international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) codes they transmit. That enables their operators, whether spy agencies or other mysterious parties, to track how people move about and potentially intercept calls and texts. (Cape also assisted the Electronic Frontier Foundation in developing technology to spot such devices, which led to evidence of one being found near the 2024 Democratic National Convention.)
The company also doesn’t collect subscriber names, addresses, or Social Security numbers, and automatically encrypts voicemails its customers receive so that the company cannot access them.
Cape has raised $61 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Costanoa Ventures, Forward Deployed VC, and Karman Ventures. Doyle says he launched the company after learning about various vulnerabilities in cellular networks, with an early focus on people involved in security-sensitive work. It then expanded to offering service to users like survivors of domestic violence, investigative journalists, and people working in other high-risk fields, says Doyle, who previously ran the national security business at Palantir and served in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
Cape launched an open beta program in March 2025 and has now officially emerged into general availability. Doyle says he believes new consumers will appreciate the company’s privacy features enough to pay Cape’s monthly fee of $99 per month before discounts.
That’s pricier than many plans from carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon, which offer base plans at $75 or less before their own discounts, not to mention discount providers like Mint Mobile, though Doyle points out that Cape’s cost includes all taxes and fees—not to mention the added privacy features.
And with most people essentially required to carry cellular phones for business and personal reasons, and growing concerns about data privacy and security, he believes there’s a market for a service that makes everyday people harder to hack and track.
“We find there’s just a wide swath of citizens who are really attracted to the idea of having some choice and taking that little bit of control over how their data is presented to and shared on mobile networks,” Doyle says.
Though Cape doesn’t own its own cell towers—it’s what’s called a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), paying for radio spectrum and other services from carriers with their own physical network—the company operates its own “mobile core” network, meaning it’s able to offer a level of customization and security beyond what other carriers offer. In other words, its partner carriers handle radio connectivity, but Cape’s cloud-based system then takes over the logic of verifying that phones have access to the network, routing calls and messages, and maintaining and securing its own logs.
The company disallows less secure 2G and 3G connections, and regularly changes IMSI numbers to discourage tracking, similar to how iPhones randomize Wi-Fi network addresses. And when users travel overseas, Cape verifies their phones’ locations using its app before routing connections through foreign networks, reducing the risk of impersonation attacks.
The company also offers a partnership with Proton, a Switzerland-based provider of secure email, VPN, and other digital services, enabling a discount for new customers. Proton offers email features like encrypted message storage and filtration of trackers embedded in messages and a VPN that can filter out ads, trackers, and malware.
And Cape explicitly supports GrapheneOS, an Android app-compatible mobile operating system optimized for security and lack of dependence on Google and Apple. The company doesn’t have an explicit partnership with the nonprofit behind Graphene, but it does make a donation to the organization for each new Graphene user that signs up, and even offers phones preloaded with the OS, unusual among mobile carriers.
“It’s a somewhat technical process to install Graphene,” says Doyle, “so we do that for people if they want.”
Customers with modern iPhone or Android devices that support eSIM—essentially, purely digital SIM cards—don’t have to buy phones through Cape and can activate an existing device and port existing numbers. If you do purchase a phone through Cape, which currently offers a range of Google Pixel devices, Cape offers a $500 phone bill discount spread over six months to help defray the device cost (and pledges to delete customer shipping and billing info after 180 days).
Users are also entitled to three numbers per line as a privacy measure, so they can provide one to friends and family and use others to receive authentication codes from businesses, for online dating, or any other privacy-centric purpose they wish. The numbers show up as ordinary numbers, so they’re not barred from services that ban purely internet-based numbers like Google Voice assigns, Doyle says. While the carrier can’t entirely protect people’s privacy when they interact with other apps—ride-hailing apps will still know people’s locations, and users may still elect to share photos or other potentially sensitive data with apps and websites—it can help people keep their primary phone numbers safe.
If subscribers wish to port their numbers to another phone or out of the Cape network, they need to provide a predetermined 25-word passphrase. That may seem daunting, but it’s designed to prevent number hijacking accounts that can be a serious risk to privacy.
In general, though, Cape’s privacy measures are designed to be relatively unobtrusive. Some may even save users time and complexity: Requiring less personal information from account holders makes the sign-up process quicker, Doyle says.
For potential customers wanting more detail about Cape’s privacy policies, the company offers a set of “privacy principles” along with information about how it will handle law enforcement requests for customer information. Cape pledges to notify customers of such requests whenever it’s legally allowed to do so (and says so far it “has not received any requests for subscriber data that contained a nondisclosure obligation”) and to challenge any secret request that “is not narrowly tailored or otherwise lawful.”
In addition, Cape says it doesn’t log phone GPS coordinates, deletes more general location data, and purges call logs after 60 days, except in situations like resolving fraud cases. And if the company is ever acquired, Doyle says, it will require the buyer to agree not to monetize user data.
Of course, it’s possible some security-conscious users will be wary that Cape will keep its promises, perhaps especially given Doyle’s background in the military and at Palantir. But Doyle says he hopes the company’s record of transparency will help it continue to establish trust among potential customers.
“We do everything we can, basically, to be transparent and to do what we said we would do, and say what we’re going to do,” he says. “And I think that over time, that will just build more and more trust in the market.”