Communication startup Mast Mobile is launching on Android — specifically the Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge.
The news is part of a broader partnership with Samsung, which has made a minority investment of undisclosed size in the company. In addition, Mast said it’s launching the first commercial integration with the Samsung Knox Cloud SDK, which provides device security.
TechCrunch’s John Biggs has compared Mast to a mullet, which sounds insane but is actually a pretty accurate description — as John put it, it “offers business up front and a party in the back.”
In other words, Mast allows you to receive calls from both your personal number and your work number on one phone. That means you don’t need to give out your personal phone number in a work context, and you can also see which number people are calling for and respond accordingly.
Mast CEO David Messenger (previously an executive at Virgin Mobile USA) told me he’s trying to create “a new model for businesses but also individuals to manage their communications.”
Samsung, he said, reached out to him last year. At the time, his team was focused on iOS, but he was excited to work with Samsung, both for the opportunity to expand overseas and for its enterprise tools, such as Knox.
Messenger argued that beyond the personal use case (which could be particularly tempting for freelancers and other participants in the “gig economy), there are big reasons for entire companies to adopt Mast, with features like PBX support and the ability to automatically log work calls in your company’s sales database.
Mast will even provide phones if necessary, although Messenger said that when the company is reselling mobile network access or renting out devices, it’s doing so at-cost: “Our business model is all about the software license.”