Civo appoints new Chief Innovation Officer

Civo, the only pure play cloud native service provider, has announced the appointment of its new Chief Innovation Officer, Josh Mesout, on the first day of Civo Navigate – its first US tech conference kicking off today in Tampa, Florida.

Mesout brings a formidable range of cloud-native and Machine Learning (ML) experience to the role. He arrives at Civo fresh from seven years at AstraZeneca, where he led the teams building the company’s Enterprise Machine learning and AI platforms. In addition to this, Mesout has led the technical implementation of Deep Learning based clinical diagnostics using cloud native technologies, built rapid prototypes in its Innovation Lab and won an award for his contribution towards implementing ML into the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Mesout has a long history with cloud and ML, assisting in the creation of learning materials, qualifications and exams for AWS’ ML platform, SageMaker.

His appointment will help accelerate Civo’s mission to build a better cloud-native world. Mesout will initially be working to develop Civo’s ML program, joining Civo’s leadership team alongside Mark Boost, CEO, Dinesh Majrekar, CTO and Saiyam Pathak, Director of Technical Evangelism. In line with the company’s ethos of making developers’ lives easier through simplicity and transparent pricing, Mesout will be building ML infrastructure that will lessen the workload on developers, significantly reducing the time from ML idea to insight. At Civo Navigate, Mesout will be unveiling Civo’s new ML product, as well as speaking in a panel on the future of AI and ML.

Mesout joins Civo at a time of significant expansion for the company. In 2021, THG Ingenuity, the technology arm of global technology platform THG, backed Civo with £1.4 million funding. Since then, Civo has invested in growing its offering to customers, building out its leadership team, and expanding its voice in the cloud-native landscape – notably with its US conference Civo Navigate.

Over the past two years, Civo has launched a whole range of initiatives to drive forward its mission of a better cloud native landscape. These range from the launch of their own Kubernetes based platform, to new edge and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, and a major new partnership on cloud sustainability with Heata. Alongside these technical offerings, Civo has launched a start up program and shifted its workforce to a four-day work week.

Josh Mesout, CIO of Civo, said “I first met Civo as a customer. I was looking for a place to run my Kubernetes cluster and before long I knew the company had incredible potential. Civo lives and breathes cloud native at a time when interoperability and choice is the key enabler to hybrid cloud adoption, cost savings and access to the cutting edge tools.

“The company also has an amazing ethos, Mark and the team introduced concepts such as four day remote work weeks and are trialing unlimited holidays. A people centric culture is at its core and the result is people aren’t afraid to have bold ideas or build disruptive products.

“The ML services from other providers often feel like a small room, offering a very fixed, inflexible path to production. When a cool new ML library comes out, you don’t want to have to think if it’s going to work on your platform. You just want it to work.

“Civo is thinking differently about how it positions its ML products, focusing on being able to be leveraged by organizations of all sizes and scaled gracefully as our customers grow. Lowering the barrier of entry to using Machine Learning to solve your problems and democratizing access to people who aren’t experts in cloud computing or configuring complex machine learning tools”

Mark Boost, CEO of Civo, “Josh’s experience and talent speaks for itself. Having someone with such capabilities come aboard is a real boon, and further highlights the strength of the trajectory we’re currently on. I can’t wait to begin working closely with Josh and help him bring his ideas to fruition. It’s an exciting time at Civo and I can’t wait to see everyone at Civo Navigate.”