Android customizer CyanogenMOD has raised 23 million in Series B

If you make a habit of flashing custom Android ROMs to your device, chances are you already know of Cyanogen. The company’s custom ROM, aptly named CyanogenMod, is perhaps the most popular one on the block, and Android users all over look forward to each release. If you’ve got some coding skills of your own and have been on the look out for a new gig, you might be happy to know that Cyanogen is currently hiring.

At the moment Cyanogen is readying an office in Shenzen, China, and plans to hire an additional 70 people (they've got just 23 now) to staff it and the other two offices they've got live now. CyanogenMod is physically housed in Seattle, Washington and Palo Alto, California - save the various at-home workers across the USA.

With this new investment round, users of CyanogenMod can expect nothing but great things in the immediate future.

While no specific product announcements arrived with the funding news, the cash influx will allow a renewed focus on making CyanogenMOD a platform, with its own brand of Android apps and utilities. The company had already taken steps to build a retinue of Google-independent products: they recently partnered with Open Whisper Systems to encrypt all messages sent between CM users; they partnered with Oppo to launch the first OEM-approved CyanogenMOD smartphone, the N1; and worked to enable screen mirroring to Apple TV and local video playback to all DLNA devices.

Promising “more new things… more often,” the team wants to develop its own design language, and perhaps adapt the CM framework, which is based on the Android Open Source Project, to work on devices other than smartphones and tablets. It’s easy to imagine the core tenets of the OS moving to smartwatches and eyewear, much like OEMs are adapting Android in their own ways.

But CyanogenMOD has an advantage over those OEMs: they’ve already been building on top of stock Android for years, creating features for low-cost hardware that few others have been able to accomplish. Because of CM and other popular custom ROMs like AOKP and Paranoid Android, aging hardware have been given access to the latest versions of the OS with few performance hits or missing features.