mesh. retro - becoming

mesh. Retrospective: Becoming

Written by Matteo Horváth

I'm sitting here in Redwood City, watching the flow of water in a beautiful park. I'm thousands of kilometers away from my friends, trying to understand what I am doing here in this world. The last time I wrote a retrospective for mesh. was in July 2025. It was really optimistic, but a lot has changed over the last 15 months.

In our first one and a half years of operations, we really had to think about our fundamentals. We had to figure out who we were, why we were here, who we were doing things with, and what we were actually doing. What we’ve realized was that running an agency and delivering software projects to customers is painfully hard.

The client we had since January 2025 basically terminated the entire project. We chose to rent out a bigger office anyways, so the community could grow with more freedom. But I had a hard time getting new customers, so we slowly started to run out of money.

We were at a breaking point. After several months without revenue, we got a new customer from the Netherlands. We were a young, technically ambitious team looking for challenges and we had real costs of running our operations. We were not experienced, but we were willing to put in the work and fail as many times as it took to get things done. So I called the Dutch client in the middle of June, before our first month of development was even over and I told them: if I didn't get some money within the next five days, our company would go under. It required a huge leap of faith for them to make that initial prepayment, but they said, 'Okay, you are young, and I believe you. Here is the money’.

That money saved us.

By September, we figured out how to deliver software projects properly. I remember sitting in the office with Bendegúz, talking about the future of mesh. and where we wanted to take it. He pointed out that the original plan to get our own place to hang out, build stuff, talk, collaborate, and have a home to go to 24/7 was practically done. So what was next?

There are always next steps, otherwise you die. So in September, we put our heads together to do the fundraising of Resoloon; a startup deploying high-altitude balloons for observing the Earth. In the next three months, through tears and sweat, we managed to help them raise 550,000 euros.

It was a phenomenal moment. What happened? We had just witnessed an insane amount of money arrive, and we realized what we were truly capable of.

Meanwhile, we entered a long negotiation and eventually secured a contract with the Hungarian Military. By December, we were sitting on top of the world. We’d dreamed something up and we could deliver on it. The feeling of power was enormous. In January, another company called Plora, building adaptive robot software for messy, changing factory work, raised over 1,000,000 euros.

With all this success, we had to take a look at where we came from, where we are today, and the future we believe in. We decided to keep mesh. as is, with the mission to find and develop talent. We look into the world and see mesh. as our home. This is where we nurture ourselves, and nurture others. This is where you go home and tell your peers that this is what happened to me, thank you for listening. This is the place we all wanted, but never got as children.

Right now, after three years of operation, we have stable funding. We have our own office. We have more than 35 members. We know what we are and we know why we are here.

Now we are at a point where we need to take a look into the future and question ourselves. We have all the resources. We have all these friends. We have all these people to ask questions from. But what should we build with it?

That’s it. Thank you.