Private infrastructure, fully under your control.
Kenji Arakawa spent eight years building distributed systems at a Tokyo-based financial data provider, where the infrastructure ran on a major US hyperscaler. The arrangement worked until it did not. In late 2018, a billing anomaly triggered a support ticket that took eleven days to resolve, during which the team had no visibility into what was actually running on their behalf. That incident was the direct reason Husk Mesh Vault was incorporated in January 2019. The premise was simple: engineering teams should be able to see every layer of the stack they depend on.
The first year was mostly hardware. Kenji negotiated a colocation agreement with a facility in Chiba, racked the first twelve servers himself, and wrote the initial provisioning API over a long summer. The first paying customer was a three-person fintech team from Osaka who needed bare-metal Kubernetes nodes that their compliance officer could physically audit. That constraint, the ability to hand an auditor a floor plan and a cable diagram, shaped every subsequent design decision. By the end of 2020, the platform had grown to 48 nodes and four customers.
Kenji Arakawa studied computer engineering at Tohoku University and spent eight years as a senior infrastructure engineer at a Tokyo financial data firm, where he was responsible for the distributed storage layer serving real-time market feeds. He left in late 2018 to found Husk Mesh Vault after a prolonged cloud-provider support incident made clear that opacity was a structural feature, not a bug, of shared infrastructure. He holds a CISSP certification and reads IETF RFCs for what he describes as light reading on the train to Chiba.