What gets us out of bed in the morning?

As someone with 20 years of telecom experience, Mathieu Duperré had seen countless industry trends come and go – but edge computing felt different. He saw its bold approach to latency reduction as the next frontier in gaming tech, so he pitched his employer to explore it further.

They humored him initially, but within a few months, the initiative was canned. The company didn’t feel that the gaming market was large or promising enough. Fortunately, their skepticism didn’t deter Mathieu. He knew he had lightning in a bottle, so there was only one thing left to do: quit his long-standing corporate gig to follow his passion.

The first order of business was to research industry conferences. One event in Berlin looked promising, but he was going completely out-of-pocket with zero funding and no product. It was both pricey and risky, with a ton of downside and a shred of potential upside. To earn a free pass, Mathieu jumped on the opportunity to join the event’s hackathon.

Within two weeks, he was onstage in front of the biggest names in the game, presenting the prototype he had pulled out of thin air. The result? First prize. Mathieu was immediately swarmed by execs asking to test his product, which didn’t exist yet.

Upon touching down in Montreal, he got straight to work renting a small office, hiring 2 engineers for a prototype and started plugging away. One year later, they had landed a seed round and haven’t looked back since