There’s a particular kind of infrastructure that only becomes visible when it fails.

Power grids. Water systems. Air traffic control.

And telecom.

When these systems work, they fade into the background of everyday life. When they fail, everything stops.

For decades, cellular networks have been optimized for one thing: reliability. Can you make a call? Can you send a text? Does the tower stay up? The implicit mandate was simple - keep the network running. Security, to the extent it was considered, was largely about preventing abuse of the system itself, not protecting the people using it.

User security was an afterthought. Metadata - who you are, where you are, who you talk to, how often - was treated as exhaust. In reality, that exhaust has been leaked, stolen, and sold. For most people, it’s a quiet erosion of privacy. For government workers and others in sensitive roles, it’s a matter of real national security risk.

But because the system mostly works, we’ve accepted that bargain. The cost of ripping and replacing the global telecom stack is measured in trillions of dollars, so we just live with it. We harden around the edges. We encrypt messages. We install VPNs. We add patches. And we hope we’re never the ones targeted via the exposure that’s left.

But hope is not a strategy.

That’s why we invested in Cape - and are excited to be leading their $100M Series C.

Cape did the hard thing. They rebuilt the telecom core itself.

Rebuilding the Core - Without Tearing Down the Towers

Telecom is the most important invisible system in the modern world. It underpins civilian life, enterprise operations, and national defense.

The problem is not that the system doesn’t work. The problem is that it works exactly as designed. It was simply designed in another era. Identity, location, and metadata are exposed by default. Even when content is encrypted, the data exhaust remains.

And as the world has become more connected - and more adversarial - that exhaust has become extraordinarily valuable. Telecom, primarily consumer infrastructure, has become key to national security. Widely publicized reports have highlighted that commercial networks have been weaponized in active conflicts. State actors have breached major carriers and quietly maintained access for years. Advances in AI have turned telecom metadata into an always-on targeting system.

The world is waking up to the reality that connectivity is no longer just about speed or coverage. It urgently needs security.

The obvious solution - rebuild everything - is impossible. No government or carrier can rip out nationwide tower infrastructure and start over.

Cape took a different approach: instead of rebuilding the physical network, they rebuilt the logical core. By operating as a heavy MVNO - a Mobile Virtual Network Operator that provides cellular service without owning towers, instead leasing radio access from existing carriers - Cape owns and controls the core of the network. That allows them to determine how devices authenticate, how identity is assigned, how signaling is routed, and what metadata is exposed. Rather than papering over the cracks, they addressed the choke point.

Owning the core turns passive cellular connectivity into programmable, secure infrastructure - without replacing a single tower. Once you do that, we believe the possibilities expand:

• For governments, it means secure mobility that doesn’t rely on bespoke hardware or classified networks.
• For drones and autonomous systems, it means a resilient fallback layer when satellites are degraded or denied.
• For allies operating on compromised infrastructure, it means a secure overlay without a trillion-dollar rip-and-replace.
• For enterprises, it means security that can’t be toggled off by an employee forgetting to turn on a VPN.
• And for consumers - journalists, executives, creators, anyone who simply doesn’t want their life indexed and auctioned - it means opting into a network designed with privacy as a first principle, not a marketing feature.

The same core, expressed in different ways.

The Relentlessness Required

As an investor, you spend years building pattern recognition - studying markets, founders, execution, and outcomes. Over time you develop a sense for which companies are incremental, and which ones exist because someone refuses to accept the status quo.

Certain companies can only be built by certain founders. Cape is one of them.

John understands this problem viscerally. Before founding Cape, he helped scale Palantir’s government business into programs of record. He knows the problem end to end, how sophisticated buyers think, and even more importantly, he knows how they procure.

I’ve often joked with John that the secret ingredient in building Cape is a high pain tolerance. He and his team have it in abundance. Re-architecting telecom is not a “move fast and break things” exercise. Selling into the U.S. government is not a growth hack. It’s a long, grinding journey that is equal parts technical, procedural, and political. The team has embraced that grind with a level of relentlessness that is rare.

Of course, as responsible investors, we spent enormous time studying the numbers - the revenue ramp, the pipeline, the margins. But the decision to partner with this team wasn’t ultimately made in a spreadsheet. It came from understanding the magnitude of the problem - and the tenacity with which they have set out to solve it.

If reliability defined telecom in the last century, privacy and survivability will define it in this one. We are excited to partner with Cape as they work to secure mobile networks - not just in the United States, but globally. And selfishly, I’m excited to live in a world where they succeed.