Edge Startup of the Year CxO Interviews: Antonio Pellegrino, Founder & CEO, Mutable

Hi Pelle ! Tell us a bit about yourself – what led you to get involved in edge computing?

The sum of a life-long interest in making people life more efficient and easier through technology and the experiences I learned from over the decades has dovetailed into the edge computing market: I started programming at twelve, built robots soon after, started an “ESPN”-style eSports streaming company, started live video streaming platform, worked on wireless charging for cars, as well as developer tools and scaling applications. The common thread through all these seemingly unrelated endeavors was their mutual dependency on infrastructure to make them cheaper, faster, and all-around better, especially easier to use and accessible; infrastructure that was at its nascency at the time. Mutable’s mission to build a public edge cloud that delivers faster internet was inspired by my desire to help give next-gen engineers access to the tools they need to build amazing things, all the thousands of ideas that were in my head, other engineers soon will be built with this new Public Edge Cloud. 

What is that you and the company are uniquely bring to the edge market?

My (and by extension, Mutable’s) path towards the edge industry represents the sum of collective experiences in the Edge’s primary use-cases. Combined with our knowledge of the cloud and how operator networks work, We’re able to connect the dots and execute creative solutions. 

Mutable does things differently: while large data center operators like AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud are just now understanding the potential of deploying on the edge, by building our software infrastructure from scratch, we have the unique ability to deploy scalable and infinitely adaptable solutions for each one of our clients’ needs rather than the “one size fits all” solutions typically offered by bigger players in the industry, who built their solution for their football stadium-size datacenters, not the hobbit holes that the edge will be deployed in. Unlike private cloud service providers such as Openstack and Redhat, we create new sources of revenue for server owners by opening up their compute to 3rd party developers. Since Mutable’s OS runs on top of any servers, we make ubiquitous compute more easily available for developers, while also empowering telcos and cable operators to improve their customer experiences.

So Mutable has made an Airbnb business style model, where we take all this already existing compute and turn it into a cloud, while still prioritizing the primary purpose of the servers. Basically, what Amazon did to create AWS we are doing with everyone else as a collective. Then revenue sharing with the owners of supply while opening it up to every new great idea who wants to deploy applications at the far edges of the access network all the way up to the cloud.  

Mutable started out in 2016 as a multi-cloud microservice platform, but we have since switched our focus to edge computing and building out the Public Edge Cloud. Our team––which is distributed over six countries–– is composed of people with backgrounds from Google Cloud, Monzo, and other domain expertise ranging from MicroControllers to building OSs and scaled infrastructure. We’ve taken part in multiple accelerator programs including CableLabs UpRamp, TechStars, and NYU Future Labs. Most recently, Mutable joined T-Mobile, NASA, and Intel’s 5G Open Innovation Lab as part of the inaugural cohort. At the beginning of 2020 we raised a $1.5 million seed round from a consortium of US and European investors including Momenta Partners, Acequia Capital, and Charlie Songhurst, led by Fly Ventures and Lunar Ventures. We are building relationships with multiple telco and cable operators and are currently deploying a few pilot projects with our first major partners. While our current target market is North American cable/telco operators and hosting companies, if all goes well, we look to scale on a global level not too far after.