A new Berlin-based startup called Amutable has launched. Interestingly, the careers of all three company founders are deeply rooted in open source, with substantial contributions to the ecosystem, and each has spent part of their career working at Microsoft.
The company is led by CEO Chris Kühl, who previously worked at Microsoft, but he has since left and is now focused full-time on Amutable.
The second name needs no introduction. Amutable’s engineering direction is shaped by Chief Engineer Lennart Poettering, the original creator of systemd, who, after a long stay in Red Hat, also joined Microsoft in 2022 and remained there through Amutable’s founding.
Technical leadership is led by CTO Christian Brauner, a well-known Linux kernel contributor recognized for his work on containers, namespaces, and core kernel security mechanisms, who previously worked at Canonical and Microsoft.
In its launch announcement, Amutable argues that most modern infrastructure security relies on watching systems for signs of compromise after changes have already occurred. According to the company, this approach is costly, brittle, and increasingly ineffective as Linux systems grow more complex.
Amutable’s core idea is to replace that model with determinism and verifiable integrity. Instead of continuously observing a running system and guessing whether it is still trustworthy, the company wants Linux systems to be built so their correctness can be explicitly defined and continuously verified.
In this model, operators could prove that a system remains in its intended state rather than merely assume it based on the absence of alerts.
The company positions this as a foundational shift in how trust is established in Linux infrastructure. Rather than layering security tools on top of mutable systems, Amutable aims to embed integrity directly into system architecture, making unexpected or unauthorized changes immediately detectable and provable.
At this stage, Amutable has not announced a product, published source code, or disclosed technical implementation details. However, given the company’s focus, it can be assumed that Amutable is positioning itself to offer some infrastructure services, tooling, or platform, but nothing concrete has been announced yet.
From my reading, the company’s name appears intentional. While Amutable has not explained it publicly, it seems less like a strict “immutable” model and more like an attempt to signal that change itself is not the problem, but only uncontrolled or unverifiable change is. This largely suggests that they will offer a product or solution in this direction.
The company’s public debut coincides with FOSDEM 2006 (this weekend), at which members of the founding team will engage with the open-source community.
Image credits: Amutable’s LinkedIn Profile
