The developers of CyanogenMod, an open source free Android-based operating system for smartphones, announced yesterday their incorporation following a successful venture capital campaign which netted the open-source project a US$7 million nest egg, and plan to roll out a simple installation app on Google Play for their Android firmware.

Android runs nearly 80% of new mobile devices; CyanogenMod operates on at least 7 or 8 million of those. CyanogenMod replaces the read-only-memory image in android devices which have been 'rooted' —control acquired of the device's superuser account— allowing continuing development for, and backporting abilities of new generations of the operating system to, older devices.

Investor <name>Mitch Lasky</name> wrote on his blog "We believe that CM is poised to become one of the largest mobile operating systems in the world." Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures are part of the capital providers to form Cyanogen Inc.

"The only limitation we have right now is with the number of engineers and designers we currently have. As we hire more people and build this company, we’ll be able to work on so many cool things", said <name>Koushik 'koush' Dutta</name>, who took questions alongside <name>Steve 'cyanogen' Kondik</name> and team social media manager <name>Abhisek "ciwrl" Devkota</name> in a Reddit Ask Me Anything event shortly after making the announcement on the CyanogenMod blog. The team of 17, including Boost co-founder <name>Kirt McMaster</name> as CEO, are in Palo Alto, California and Seattle.

<name>Kondik</name> says Cyanogen mod is named after him. "I'm terrible with names, so I just slapped 'mod' onto the end of my handle and ran with it", he explained in the incorporation announcement.