SAN FRANCISCO—OCTOBER 18, 2012—Burner, the iPhone app that issues disposable numbers at the touch of a button, garnered a lot of notice on its launch, generating coverage across mainstream news sources from Time magazine to Yahoo!, and cracking the top 20 paid apps in iTunes. Now they have attracted the attention of Silicon Valley investors. Burner struck a chord among mobile users with its unique approach to privacy, and today Los Angeles-based Ad Hoc Labs, Burner’s parent company, announced it has raised an angel round of funding. Participating in the financing are 500 Startups, David Cohen, Ted Rheingold, Scott Marlette, Robert Goldberg, Kevin Slavin, and Ric Calvillo, among other investment funds and individual angels. “We are thrilled to have such an experienced group of investors committed to Ad Hoc Labs,” said CEO and co-founder Greg Cohn, an entrepreneur whose experience includes 4 previous startups and a stint running developer platform strategy at Yahoo! “There’s plenty of capital out there, but we’re bringing together a team of proven investors with domain expertise in social and mobile innovation and communities – not to mention an awesome track record at company-building.” Investor Dave McClure of 500 Startups says, “Burner is a game-changer for privacy and identity on the phone. Companies like Ad Hoc Labs leverage technology to challenge people to look at traditional consumer behaviors, like making phone calls, in new ways – exactly the kind of company we like to back.” The financing will be used to build out new features for Burner and market the app, as well as to launch an Android version of the application, which the company plans to release in the fourth quarter of this year. “Burner for Android has been, far and away, the most common request from our users,” said co-founder and Head of Product Will Carter. “We expect it to be very popular.” The amount of the financing is undisclosed. The announcement was made at the Twilio developer conference in San Francisco, an annual confab for companies building applications on top of Twilio’s telephony platform. Ad Hoc Labs also provided some updates on how users are using the app, disclosing that it had serviced more than 300,000 voice minutes and over 450,000 text messages since its launch in mid-August, noting that the SMS format is significantly more
popular on Burner than voice.
“We hoped Burner would become a privacy layer for the phone, and our users seem to be turning it into exactly that,” says Cohn. “We’re seeing people use Burner for everything from dating and Craigslist to some really unexpected situations like grassroots calling parties for Obama, landlords using them for their tenants, and even a guy who used Burner to set up a sting operation to get his stolen bike back,” said Cohn.
About Ad Hoc Labs, Inc.
Ad Hoc Labs, Inc. is a privately held software development company based in Los Angeles, CA. Co-founders Greg Cohn (formerly of Yahoo!, and several prior startups) and Will Carter (formerly of Nokia, and whose previous efforts include several early and innovative mobile and location apps) want to re-invent the phone network.
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Name: Burner for iPhone
Platform: iOS 4.3 or greater
Download: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/burner-disposable-phone-numbers/id505800761?mt=8 or http://brnr.me/ios
More info: http://burnerapp.com
Price: $1.99 (includes credit good for one phone number)
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Burner phone app fires up Silicon Valley investors
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Contact:
Greg Cohn
CEO, Ad Hoc Labs
press@adhoclabs.co