About ShadowCradle — Built by Disaster Recovery Experts
ShadowCradle is a product of Takelan, a Tampa-based enterprise technology company. It was designed by engineers with hands-on experience in backup, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity - people who have written the filesystems, debugged the restores, and shipped the products that came before it.
Built on independence. Designed for resilience.
Technology should give people and businesses more control, not less.
Takelan has been in business since 2008, and it was built around a simple belief: the systems organizations depend on every day should be secure, resilient, and under their control. As businesses grew more dependent on interconnected infrastructure, cloud services and software, the cost of complexity grew with them. Critical systems got harder to manage, security got harder to maintain, and too many organizations ended up relying on tools that offered convenience at the expense of flexibility.
We saw an opportunity to build something different: infrastructure, security and data protection that work together, without unnecessary complexity.
From engineering to infrastructure
We build by understanding how systems actually work, finding where they fail, and designing solutions that stay dependable under real-world conditions. We focus on the fundamentals: reliability, performance, privacy, and the freedom to operate technology on your own terms.
An independent approach
Takelan is building a family of infrastructure and security products: ShadowCradle for backup and disaster recovery, Firecradle for network security, and VCradle for virtualization. Each solves a distinct need under one philosophy: make complex technology more manageable and critical systems more resilient. VCradle and Firecradle are in development.
Open, not locked in
We do not hide how we operate. We integrate with other tools, publish open documentation, and support full export and import in portable formats, so you are never held in place by a single vendor.
Built for what comes next
Infrastructure will become more distributed and threats will keep evolving. We build software that is secure by design, flexible by default, and dependable when it matters most, without making you give up control of your data, your systems or your direction.
Independent technology. Resilient infrastructure. Your systems, your control.
We did not start with a pitch deck.
We started with a problem.
What We Stand For
These are not company values written by a committee. They are the decisions we made when we had to choose between the easy path and the right one. They shape every architecture decision, every pricing call, and every line of code.
Cradle
"We have been in the war room. We know what vendors promise vs. what actually works."
"If a non-specialist cannot deploy it, we have not finished building it."
"Software priced per device, server or host."
"Not a premium tier. Not a checkbox. The baseline."
"A backup you cannot restore in time is not a backup."
"We say what works and what does not."
Built by Practitioners
Hands-on DR engineering experience on this team"We have been in the war room. We know what vendors promise vs. what actually works."
Every person who designed ShadowCradle has personally debugged a failed restore under pressure. The fully chain free based backup architecture, the guided setup wizard, the per-block encryption - these were not features dreamed up in a product meeting. They came from scar tissue.
Simplicity is an Engineering Standard
Auto-discovers drives, sets parity, configures replication - before coffee"If a non-specialist cannot deploy it, we have not finished building it."
Complexity is technical debt we refuse to pass on to customers. When our setup wizard asks you three questions and configures replication, parity, and cloud backup automatically, that is not a sales demo trick. That is the product.
Clear Pricing
Replication and cloud management included for cloud-connected appliances"Software priced per device, server or host."
Replication and cloud management are included for cloud-connected appliances. Cloud management is not available on the offline Airgap tier. Vault and Archive storage are priced per TB. Contact us for pricing.
Security as Default State
Optional customer-managed keys"Not a premium tier. Not a checkbox. The baseline."
AES-256-GCM per-block encryption with unique nonces, optional customer-managed keys, TLS 1.3, immutable point-in-time snapshots, and pre-backup ransomware detection ship with every appliance. You do not configure security in ShadowCradle. It is already on.
Recovery Time Over Everything
Scheduled restore verification records measured restore times"A backup you cannot restore in time is not a backup."
We optimise for how fast you get running, not for storage efficiency metrics. Fully chain free based backup snapshots mean any recovery point is immediately available - no chain rebuild, no waiting. We independently store each section of each snapshot and map it to deliver minimum space usage, maximum performance, and optimal reliability for cloud-based backups. Every architecture decision starts with the question: how does this affect RTO?
Radical Honesty
Limits are stated before you buy"We say what works and what does not."
If a configuration will not work for your use case, we tell you before you buy. Trust is built on truth - and truth compounds.
Leadership Team
People who have built backup and DR systems - not just sold them.
Derek Demuro
Chief Technology OfficerArchitect. Builder. Two decades designing backup, disaster recovery and cybersecurity systems.
Derek has spent over two decades designing enterprise backup, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity systems - not as an analyst, but as the engineer who built them. He worked at Replibit, an early pioneer in image-based BDR later acquired by Axcient, where he spent nearly four years building FUSE filesystems, replication infrastructure, and virtualization tooling in C++ and Python at the core engine level.
Over his career Derek has led engineering across products spanning backup, firewall infrastructure, DNS threat protection, identity and authentication, and AI-driven threat intelligence. He has operated at every layer: from kernel-level filesystems and replication engines to distributed global infrastructure and machine learning pipelines.
At ShadowCradle, Derek conceived and built the entire platform architecture: the encryption model with optional customer-managed keys, point-in-time recovery engine, fully chain free based backups and chained backup agent, and AI-based ransomware detection, turning a deeply personal two-decade engineering journey into a single, unified appliance.
Andrew Bensinger
Chief Executive OfficerOperator. Builder. 20+ years at the intersection of DR and engineering.
Andrew brings over 20 years of experience building and scaling disaster recovery products and engineering organizations. He has spent his career at the intersection of product leadership, systems engineering, and go-to-market execution - including holding 3 US patents in disaster recovery technology covering automated backup image management, incremental replication, and mirroring high-availability systems.
As VP of Engineering, Andrew led teams building resilient infrastructure for managed service providers and enterprises - the same audience ShadowCradle serves today. That deep technical background in backup consistency, recovery automation, and data integrity systems directly informs every architectural decision ShadowCradle makes.
As CEO of ShadowCradle, Andrew translates two decades of practitioner insight into product strategy and customer success. He ensures every feature shipped solves a real problem - and that the total cost of ownership remains the industry's most compelling story.
Bruno Bense
Customer Engineering LeadEngineering practitioner. Customer advocate. Bridges product, support, and delivery.
Bruno brings a decade of hands-on experience in backup, disaster recovery, and network infrastructure, with roots that run through the same technologies and products that shaped ShadowCradle. He progressed from junior software engineer to escalation engineer at a leading BDR platform, contributing to front-end and back-end of the flagship product and enabling PXE deployments that reduced hardware overhead for partners. He also built a driver injection utility from scratch for offline Windows recovery from a Linux toolkit - the exact kind of low-level problem ShadowCradle still solves.
Before moving into software, Bruno spent three years in network consulting, assisting enterprise clients with network design and service continuity - the same focus that drives ShadowCradle's multi-site replication and recovery architecture. Based in Montevideo, Uruguay, he is part of Takelan's engineering hub supporting ShadowCradle's development and global infrastructure operations.
Bruno Demuro
Chief Operating OfficerFounder. Operator. From surgical AI to wildfire detection - scale through execution.
Bruno Demuro is a serial entrepreneur and operator with over a decade of experience building and scaling technology companies from zero to revenue. He co-founded Armor Bionics in 2015, a medical AI company that created a cloud platform converting CT/MRI scans into 3D-printable surgical planning models - growing to a $3.5M annual revenue pipeline and partnerships with IBM, Ricoh, and Stratasys. He also founded Domotics, scaling it from a $25K investment to $300K in revenue and 5,000+ customers in under two years.
As COO of TheDevBlock, Bruno drove a 400% revenue increase in one year, built a product line from scratch (50x conversion rate improvement), and led operational, recruiting, and KPI systems across the organization. He has deep roots in Takelan - joining the team from 2010 - and brings both the entrepreneurial fire and the operational rigor that ShadowCradle needs to scale.
At Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, Bruno leads hardware and program management for an open-source AI and IoT system deployed across four continents for real-time environmental monitoring. He is a TEDx speaker and has been recognized for advancing value-based healthcare through AI.
Advisors
Practitioners who've been in the trenches and help us stay focused on what MSPs actually need.
John Hardwick
AdvisorMSP owner. 22+ years running managed IT services. Real-world backup & recovery in the field.
John is President of nXio, LLC., an MSP he has run since 2004 out of Lenexa, Kansas. With over two decades managing IT infrastructure for business clients - spanning networking, cybersecurity, backup & recovery, and cloud services - John represents the exact customer ShadowCradle is built for. Before nXio, he architected hosted Citrix and Active Directory infrastructure for 500+ remote users at EPIC Alliance and built scalable Microsoft/Citrix environments serving 2,000+ users at Imago ASP Systems. His ground-level perspective on what MSPs actually need keeps the ShadowCradle roadmap honest.
A Takelan Product
ShadowCradle is part of the Takelan product family - a Tampa-based enterprise software company in business since 2008. Takelan builds deep, integrated infrastructure products designed to eliminate operational complexity for managed service providers and enterprises. Every product in the ecosystem shares a common DNA: practical engineering, transparent pricing, and a relentless focus on operational simplicity.
Takelan Product Ecosystem