"Part of the learned helplessness consumers experience stems from the lack of meaningful choices for cell service and the pervasive belief that privacy must be compromised for connectivity."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

“We cannot turn back time to a world where essential communication only happens in sensitive information facilities, or over private networks. Rather than doubling down on outdated protocols, we need to fix the existing broken network—commercial cellular.”

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"When the founder of Cape told me he's building the new mobile carrier for privacy, I said, 'That's the hardest company you could build.' He's working to make it possible to be on your cell phone and not be found. That's the holy grail if you're a DoD operator or if you're a high net worth individual. This actually doesn’t exist yet. All the carriers can track your data."

Katherine Boyle, American Dynamism Co-Founder

"Even with lockdown mode, even with a VPN, you've protected the data at the application layer. The whole cellular side is still left wide open."

David Dunn, Chief Architect at Cape

"When you look at how our world has changed in the last few decades, one of the big changes is how connected we are, how much data is being produced, how its being uses, and what its worth... There are going to be adverse effects from the way we've decided to give up our data so freely in order to have all the great benefits of being connected all the time. Cape is a conscious way to take some of that back."

Ruddy Wang, Head of Consumer Growth at Cape

"Most telecom operators spend just 3% of their budget on R&D, outsourcing the real engineering work to vendors. Cape flips that model — we're a majority-engineering team, hands-on-keyboard building our own network from scratch."

Ruddy Wang, Head of Consumer Growth at Cape

“Today’s military relies on the same networks that we all use every day—the same carriers that are repeatedly hacked and exploited. These networks are universally available, making them irresistibly convenient to use including in military contexts. This in turn makes it easy for bad actors to track military activity just from their phones.”

John Doyle, CEO of Cape, testifying before Congress

"We logically become the United States' answer to Huawei. Huawei is where China has consolidated talent, capital, and research & development muscle around telecomunications problems. It's a huge strategic advantage for them that they have that domestically...One thing we didn't have in the midst of the 5G race was an answer to Huawei, and that's what Cape becomes."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"I was very concerned that telcos and phone makers have all this information about you and can do pretty much anything they want with it. The telcos in particular can resell it and violate your privacy. From a security perspective, threat actors can break in and tap into those sources of data, and there was nothing you could do about it. Then John came along with Cape and actually offered a solution."

Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder of Crowdstrike

"Telco networks are a wonderland for attackers... there's actually a company... that's doing some interesting stuff around telco—it's called Cape."

Patrick Gray, Risky Business

“We want to overwhelm the system with how much better it can be... so we put Cape, a Mobile Virtual Network Operator startup, in Guam... hands-on testing with the best stuff gives us a chance to scale significantly faster.”

Justin Fanelli, Navy CTO

“A traditional telco’s security program is built around one thing: stopping people from making free calls. That was the big threat in the 90s. We’ve flipped the script—our goal is to protect subscribers from privacy breaches and security threats. Totally different priorities.”

Adam Judelson, Emergent Podcast

“If you look at search activity for privacy-preserving technologies around the time of traumatic events... interest returns to a slightly higher baseline every time... where people are always looking more and more to turn to privacy-respecting technologies.”

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"The Pentagon has made real, top-level policy changes to encourage innovation. But it must do more to ensure that our soldiers are equipped with the very best of what they need and deserve, and find and root out these pockets of stalled bureaucratic inertia. Because America’s enemies are real enough – our own red tape should not be one of them."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"Americans, unlike residents of many other countries, have long had the option of being able to sign up for a phone line without presenting personal information or an ID. This option to communicate without being catalogued helps rather than harms our safety and security. We should defend this right both as a feature of a free society and as an imperative for national security."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

“At Cape, privacy and security are the entire product, not just a feature.”

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"Traditionally, telecoms focus on interoperability and perimeter security—only securing themselves from the outside, from non-Telco adversaries. At Cape, we approach it a little bit differently. We don't trust anybody, and we make sure to secure the perimeter from the outside, as well as between ourselves, internal to our own systems, and other telcos."

Stephen Dowhy, Head of Engineering at Cape

“We think we can get away with it until something bad happens – someone's stolen our identity, or in this case, gotten a peek at classified war plans with lives on the line. This story, as surprising as it seems, is bound to repeat itself until we accept that modern mobile is how we communicate… We need to find a way to make it more secure.”

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"The status quo in the telecom industry was really really poor when it comes to cybersecurity... Over 4 years now we've been able to make real strides, and I'm confident that we are meaningfully better than any other cellular carrier from a cybersecurity perspective."

Justin Fanelli, Navy CTO

“Turning off the cellular network is off the table... That has disastrous consequences. We can’t turn it off—so we have to secure it."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"A lot of attention is being paid to the need for low-cost distributable systems... Low amounts of investment can cause huge damage to an adversary. That's where Cape blazes in the global cell network. Rather than investing in trillion-dollar bets on absolute dominance in a small number of exquisite systems, how do we win the scrappy, messy asymmetric war?"

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"I started Cape because I couldn’t fathom how we’d painted ourselves into this [of poor security hygiene]. While we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube in terms of reliance on mobile devices, we can offer people a cell service that’s built to actually protect them."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"Privacy has always been a sacrifice for the sake of other types of conveniences. The way we rectify that is to make privacy convenient, and make sure you don't have to make major compromises to be private."

Ruddy Wang, Head of Consumer Growth at Cape

“Cellular networks were built to prioritize interoperability over privacy and this has become increasingly recognized and exploited by bad actors. All of the major US telcos have suffered major breaches in recent years, with the recent Salt Typhoon attacks as only the latest example.”

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

“Telecommunications networks are critical infrastructure… trusted with our nation’s most sensitive data. We’ve installed really well-defined, very knowable, mandatory backdoors into the infrastructure, and done a poor job of holding the networks accountable [for their safeguarding].”

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"A feature is only as good as someone who turns it on... By being at the network layer, we offer security services without necessarily needing to have many interventions."

Iranga Kahangama, Head of APAC Growth at Cape

"If you're new to privacy, I think most people should start with Signal and a VPN. A privacy-respecting MVNO is a good starting point and a real improvement. But for anyone who wants to go deeper, Cape is the only option right now that's addressing that infrastructure layer."

Techlore

"With enterprises, there is a certain standard that needs to be met from a security perspective—device security, nework security, compliance, policies... Right now with telco, enterprises have none of that. When you think about how we protect data, if you put customer data on an AWS instance, that's locked down. You have complete knowledge of how it's being used and stored. That same data is on telecom networks, and you have no visibility or control. That's the key area where Cape is changing how enterprises use telecom. They now have network-level control over how their phones are being used."

Ajit Gokhale, Head of Enterprise at Cape

"I think we logically become the United States' answer to Huawei. China has consolidated talent, capital, and R&D muscle around telecommunications—that's a huge strategic advantage, and the U.S. has no domestic answer to it. Whether you think we won or lost the 5G race, one thing is clear: we didn't have an answer to Huawei. Cape is where that talent and capital can accumulate around telecom in the U.S."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"When I went through the Special Forces training pipeline, by far the most common reason people washed out was they quit. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do enough pull-ups or whatever, they just decided they were done and they quit. The only way a startup can fail is if you run out of money or quit. And if you’ve got high enough pain tolerance to not quit, then you just have to keep an eye on your burn rate and you’re all set."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape

"Telecom network attacks are especially dangerous because users can’t protect themselves through better security habits or caution. Even if you turn off location sharing and put your phone on lockdown mode, your phone still has to connect to cellular networks in order to work. The design itself lets adversaries access it remotely. The solution requires not the individual, but industry, lawmakers, and the Pentagon."

John Doyle, CEO of Cape