In a very surprising move today, CyanogenMod founder and lead developer – Steve Kondik – announced that Cyanogen Inc. is now a full fledged company. The talks about turning this after market custom ROM into a company started late last year, with the company being founded in April this year. 

Since then, Cyanogen Inc. has been silently working from its offices in Palo Alto and Seattle, and has rolled out many new features and services like Privacy Guard, Focal and CyanogenMod account.

With CyanogenMod Inc., the CM team is looking to offer people a viable and useful alternative to the stock Android experience out there. Currently, the team will focus on refining its user experience and usability, and the first major step towards that is by solving the horrific installation process by releasing a CyanogenMod Installer app on the Play Store in the coming weeks.

The company has raised $7 million in its first round of funding, and is also working closely with a potential hardware partner. The company does not have any revenue model right now, but has a few ideas which will help it down the line.

The most interesting part, however, is that down the line Cyanogen Inc. wants to become the third major ecosystem out there, and a viable alternative to Android and iOS. Right now, the CyanogenMod user base, even with such a tedious installation process, is around 8 million. The third major ecosystem right now is Windows Phone, which CyanogenMod can easily eclipse if the company manages to make the installation process easier.

Head over to the official CyanogenMod blog for a slight background of the custom ROM and how the company came to be formed.