A green phone icon on a mint background, sitting on the home screen of several million people who decided their real number was nobody's business. The logo hasn't changed much. The idea never had to.
Here is a thing about your phone number that is easy to forget: you only get one, and you give it to everyone. You give it to your bank and your dentist, which is fine, and you also give it to the guy selling a couch on Craigslist, the dating app, the restaurant that wants to text you when the table is ready, and the contractor you will never call again. Each of those is a small decision that feels free at the moment you make it. Collectively they add up to a permanent record, tied to your name, that follows you around and rings at dinner. In 2012, a small Los Angeles company called Ad Hoc Labs looked at this arrangement and concluded, reasonably, that it was a bad deal.
Their solution was an app called Burner, and the pitch fits on an index card: create a number in seconds, use it when you need it, delete it when you don't. The name is borrowed from the "burner phone" - the disposable handset that, in the movies, people use when they'd rather not be traced. Ad Hoc Labs took that concept, which had until then required a trip to a convenience store and a fistful of cash, and turned it into a button. Tap the button, get a real, working U.S. phone number. Give it out. When it has served its purpose, burn it. The number goes away and takes its associations with it.
This is the kind of idea that seems obvious in retrospect and was not obvious at all at the time. The interesting question about Ad Hoc Labs is not whether the idea was good - it clearly was, and Burner has spent more than a decade proving it. The interesting question is why nobody else had made phone numbers disposable, and the answer is roughly that phone numbers had always been treated as fixed infrastructure, like a street address, rather than as something you could mint and discard like a paper cup. Ad Hoc Labs' contribution was mostly a change of category. They decided a phone number could be a consumable, and then they built the plumbing to make that true.
The company was founded by Greg Cohn and Will Carter. Cohn, the CEO, came out of Yahoo, where he had spent years in product and business development roles - the sort of background that teaches you how large systems actually reach large numbers of people. Carter handled the technical side. Together they set up shop not in San Francisco but in Los Angeles, in the Atwater Village and Los Feliz corner of the city, which at the time was an unfashionable place to build a technology startup and has aged rather well as a decision. Cohn has described the goal as building practical, high-utility tools that solve real problems without a lot of unnecessary complexity, which is a modest way of describing a company that created a product category.
If you want a single sentence that explains Ad Hoc Labs, it is on their own about page, and it is refreshingly free of jargon: they build products that let people "control who can reach them, separate different parts of their lives, and reduce unwanted contact - without adding friction." That last clause is the whole game. Privacy tools usually fail not because they don't work but because they are annoying, and the annoying ones don't get used. Burner's insight was that privacy, to be adopted, has to feel like convenience.
The numbers describe a company that stayed deliberately lean. There are software firms with a hundred times the headcount and a fraction of the goodwill. A 4.7-star average across tens of thousands of reviews is not a marketing achievement. It is what happens when an app does exactly what it says and then gets out of the way.
Everything Ad Hoc Labs makes is a variation on the same theme: you should decide who gets to reach you, and on which number.
The original. Create alias numbers for calls, texts, and picture messages, then delete them when you're done. Use one for dating, one for a classified ad, one for travel, one for a side project - each walled off from your real line and from each other. It is the privacy layer for your phone, and it started the category.
Pitched as "a macro tool for micro-business." Dialed gives a solopreneur a second business number plus the machinery to run it: business voicemail, bulk messaging, contact management, spam blocking, auto-replies, and custom labels - all on the phone they already own, no second device required.
A companion app aimed at the thing everyone hates equally: spam and scam calls. Firewall screens and blocks unwanted callers, extending the same control-your-inbound-contact logic that has always been the point.
The economics of Burner are the economics of a well-made utility. It is a freemium app: you can try it, and if you find yourself reaching for it, you pay - a subscription or an in-app purchase, roughly in the one-to-fifteen-dollar range depending on what you need. There is no advertising business hiding in the background, which matters for a product whose entire premise is privacy. The company sells you control, and you pay for control. That is a cleaner alignment than most apps can claim, and it is probably why the reviews are as warm as they are.
The funding history is similarly unflashy. Burner raised a small angel round in 2012 - early believers included Techstars' David Cohn and 500 Startups' Dave McClure - and followed it with a seed round of about $2 million in 2013, led by Founder Collective and Venrock. Other investors over time have included Miramar Digital Ventures and TenOneTen. This is not the story of a company that raised a war chest and set it on fire. It is the story of a company that raised enough to build something durable and then, notably, kept building it.
The most quietly remarkable fact about Ad Hoc Labs is that it is still here, still independent, and still owned by its founders and a small group of backers, more than fourteen years after Burner shipped. In app years that is close to geological time. The usual arc for a successful consumer app is a quick rise, an acquisition, and then a slow fade inside a larger company that never quite knew what to do with it. Ad Hoc Labs skipped that arc. It stayed small, stayed remote, and kept the plot: it makes phone tools that work, and it does not appear to have been tempted into pivoting toward whatever was fashionable in any given year.
There is a version of this profile that would call that "resilience." It is really just focus, which is rarer and more useful. The company describes its own values as favoring "utility, reliability, and clear value over feature volume," and you can see that discipline in the products. Burner in 2026 is recognizably the Burner of a decade ago - refined, faster, better at blocking spam, but not bloated into something it was never meant to be. That restraint is a strategy, even if it doesn't look like one.
The use cases are the tell. People reach for Burner at exactly the moments when handing over a permanent number feels like a mistake: selling something to a stranger, posting a dating profile, traveling somewhere they'd rather not be reachable, running a project that shouldn't ring their personal line at midnight. Dialed's users are the millions of people quietly running a business out of one phone - the freelancers, consultants, and tradespeople for whom "work" and "life" had collapsed into a single overloaded number until an app drew the line back. In both cases the product is doing something small and specific and genuinely helpful, which is a harder thing to build than it sounds.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angel | ~$500K | Oct 2012 | David Cohn, Dave McClure / 500 Startups, Kevin Slavin |
| Seed | $2M | Sep 2013 | Founder Collective, Venrock |
| Series A | $2M | Oct 2013 | Founder Collective, Venrock |
Figures compiled from public sources (Crunchbase, TechCrunch). Amounts and dates are approximate.
Ad Hoc Labs is a Los Angeles-based independent mobile software company that builds communication tools giving people control over how they can be reached. Its flagship app, Burner, launched in 2012 as the original disposable second phone number - a privacy layer that lets users spin up, use, and delete alias numbers on demand. Its second product, Dialed, packages a business phone line, contact management, and marketing tools into one app for solopreneurs and micro-businesses. Founded by Greg Cohn and Will Carter, the company remains independent and remote, focused on utility and reliability over feature volume.
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