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 20+ years of 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.
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 in 30 minutes, we have not finished building it."
"One price. Every feature. No asterisks."
"Not a premium tier. Not a checkbox. The baseline."
"A backup you cannot restore in time is not a backup."
"We publish TCO comparisons that show where we are and where we are not the cheapest."
Built by Practitioners
20+ years of hands-on DR engineering 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 30-minute 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 in 30 minutes, 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.
No Hidden Costs. Full Stop.
Replication, cloud mgmt, and failover all included at base price"One price. Every feature. No asterisks."
Replication is not a tier. Cloud management is not a plugin. Multi-site failover is not an enterprise add-on. We watched the industry turn capabilities into revenue lines - and decided not to. The price you see on day one is the price on year three.
Security as Default State
Zero-knowledge: we cannot access your data even if we wanted to"Not a premium tier. Not a checkbox. The baseline."
AES-256-GCM per-block encryption with unique nonces, zero-knowledge architecture, 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
5–15 minute VM RTO, measured - not estimated"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
Full 3-year TCO breakdowns published, including competitor numbers"We publish TCO comparisons that show where we are and where we are not the cheapest."
If a competitor does something better, we say so. If a feature is on the roadmap and not yet shipped, we say so. 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. 20+ years in backup & disaster recovery.
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 is a co-founder of 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 zero-knowledge encryption model, 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 founded in 2010. 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