top of page
About us
Thank you for being here to learn more about Rego
​
Here you will find: Founder bios, mission, vision, and founding journey
Our mission
Sustainable urban living
Our mission is to build cleaner communities so that people can have confidence in where they live, anywhere in the world.
​
We're taking the first step by reducing the amount of furniture and other physical goods that get sent to landfills, or your sidewalks.
Rego is working to address UN goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities
Josh Mastromatto
Co-founder, CEO
It's great to meet you!
I've spent my life at the intersections of construction, hauling, and technology. I started working on job sites at 13 years old and fell in love with the idea that new technology and inventions could positively impact how we interact with the world.
Inventions from simple paint brushes to new hauling trucks, and artificial intelligence helped take life from mud and clay to skyscrapers and rocket ships.
Fun facts:
I'm the self-proclaimed best Philadelphia tour guide.
I was in two movies and one documentary.
I'm a former arena football player and lived at an Olympic Development Academy for rugby 7's.
Brandon Castagna
Co-founder, CTO
Thanks for stopping by!
I’m Brandon, a lifelong software engineer who's passionate about innovating antiquated technology systems.
I started my career as the lead software engineer at a fintech start-up when I was 18 years old. I was the first engineer hired for the company and third overall employee, and I helped the company scale to over 400 employees before co-founding Rego.
I specialize in API development, system integrations, system design, and architecture. I completed a bachelor’s degree in information systems with a minor in computer science from Villanova University.
Fun facts:
I'm your go-to-guy for credit card travel points.
I love chess.
And I love hiking and travelling and one day aim to own my own plane.
Company Journey
Part 1
Our journey started with overlapping problems.
The first: Throughout life, we both moved A LOT - and knew the painful question of "what do I do with all of this stuff that isn't coming with me?"
It seems like such an innocent question with innocent answers (marketplaces, donation centers, buy nothing, etc.)
But alas, there were always challenges around timing, price, and convenience, which ultimately led to a lot of stuff unnecessarily going to waste. These challenges were amplified in apartment buildings.
Part 2
The second: Throughout our travels, we noticed an alarming amount of trash on the streets in urban cities.
So upon moving to Philadelphia in 2017, I started organizing local neighborhood street clean-ups. I couldn't help but notice that everywhere I looked I'd see couches, mattresses, tables, or chairs dumped all over the city: a curb, under a bridge, next to a river - you name it.
And, of course, that didn't seem right.
I know that to be human is to seek comfort, and furniture was invented thousands of years ago to meet that basic human need. So then, shouldn't there a better solution for our furniture than a curb?
Part 3
Today, furniture is such a ubiquitous part of our lives, and we're surrounded by it (almost) everywhere that we go.
So then, after thousands of years of human innovations, why is there a couch dumped under a bridge?
The EPA even estimates over 12M tons of furniture sent to landfills annually in the US. That's an over 400% increase since they started tracking it in the 60's
To bring this story full circle: We interviewed hundreds of people who were moving, countless waste and junk haulers, non-profits, recycling centers, furniture stores, city reps - the list goes on.
As it turns out, there's a familiar, growing challenge behind the scenes: Millions of people are moving every year and they're running into the same timing, pricing, and convenience challenges that we encountered ourselves when moving. This is leading to rampant illegal dumping, a backlogged waste system, and skyrocketing prices for junk removal - especially for those in apartment buildings.
The journey continues
That's when the idea of Rego was born.
We put our noggins together (with the help of many others) to merge innovative technology, talented junk removal companies, and non-profits/recycling centers to address this challenge head on.
Brandon and I created Rego to be an easy, practical, and affordable approach to building a circular economy for furniture and other physical hard-to-recycle goods.
If you've made it this far, we're grateful for your time, attention, and support. We're excited to see how our story will unfold over the next twenty years.
bottom of page