We built The Ark for our own families first.
ArkCentral is a team of engineers who got tired of trusting other people's servers with the photos and messages that matter most. This page is who we are, and why we built this.
Three families, the same problem.
In late 2022, a few of us were at dinner talking about what we kept seeing at work and in the news. Cloud breaches every week. Personal photos and messages quietly used to train AI models. Terms of service that change every quarter. Accounts suspended with years of someone's life locked inside. And somewhere along the way, keeping our own photos had turned into a flurry of subscriptions, each one renting us back something that was already ours. Joe had been building a decentralized file transfer protocol on the side. That became the seed, and six months later ArkCentral was incorporated. But each of us got there from somewhere personal.
Francis · Co-founder, Product
I grew up in a big family. There was always a wedding, a newborn, or a reunion on the calendar, and always someone holding up a camera. Almost none of those photos survived. They lived on whichever phone took them, in a group chat that scrolled away, on a drive that stopped spinning. Ask for a picture from a cousin's wedding ten years ago and you get a shrug. Then I spent years at Nielsen building the data infrastructure that targeted advertising runs on, and learned exactly how much personal data flows through those pipes. The Ark is what I wish my family had twenty years ago.
Joe · Co-founder, Technology & Infrastructure
I am a family man with kids, and I have always spent my spare time tinkering with electronics and building new things, IoT projects and the like. Our own photos were scattered across hard drives and old accounts, so I started building a way to bring them home. Most people do not want to spend their life building that. The Ark is built so you can enjoy your memories without the complexity, or the fear of losing them.
Luc · Business Development
I have lived in five countries in the past ten years, and my family is spread across three countries. My memories are scattered across all of them: different apps, shared albums, group chats, accounts I barely remember. I want to bring The Ark to people who care about memories that last, and to travelers like me who have never had one place to keep them.
Three different lives, one answer. The Ark is a single device in your home that every photo, video, and message flows into, and you own it outright. What flows through it is encrypted from your phone to the box in your home, and we make our money selling the device, not learning what is on it. If you have a question about any of this, write to us. A real person answers.
Three people you can actually email.
The Ark lives in your home, so you should know whose work you are trusting. Here is who builds it and who you will hear from.
Francis Yu
Co-founder, Product
francis@arkcentral.comRuns the product: what The Ark does, how it feels to use, and the apps that come with it. BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering and MS in Systems Engineering from Cornell. Built data infrastructure at Nielsen before ArkCentral. Grew up in a big family where the photos never stuck around, and built The Ark so the next generation's would.
LinkedIn
Joe Shay
Co-founder, Technology & Infrastructure
joe@arkcentral.comRuns the technology and infrastructure that keeps The Ark accessible. Computer Engineering and Networking from NYU Polytechnic, then decades in telecommunications, including AT&T. He designed the networking layer that lets The Ark run on an ordinary home connection with no technical setup. A family man with thousands of photos scattered across hard drives and old accounts, he built The Ark to bring them home.
Luc Wynne
Business Development
luc@arkcentral.comRuns the commercial side: sales, pricing, partnerships, and the people who bring The Ark to new families. MSc in International Management from WU & NUS. Has experience in building data platforms for mid-sized European companies. Family spread across three countries and photos scattered across all of them, he joined ArkCentral to help other families put them in one place.
Around the three of us is a team of ten, with degrees from top universities across the world and careers spent building large-scale data products and consumer products at companies like Nielsen and AT&T. Between us we cover software, hardware design, cryptography, and secure networking. We are lean but growing rapidly, and always looking to grow with like-minded people. If that sounds like you, email support@arkcentral.com with the subject line "Recruitment" and attach your CV.
Three things we will not compromise on.
Own the device, own the data.
Renting privacy from someone else's cloud is not ownership. It is a lease, and the terms can change. Your photos should live on hardware that is yours.
Your data is not our business model.
We make money by selling you a device, not by learning what is on it. Your photos and messages live on your Ark, in your home. We do not have access to them, even if we wanted to.
Encrypted from your device to your Ark.
Every message you send and every photo you upload is encrypted in transit, from your phone all the way to the box in your home. No middleman along the way can see or know what is being transferred. Not a network, not a relay, not us.
Where to find us.
Arkra LLC is the legal entity behind ArkCentral, registered in Sheridan, Wyoming.
1309 Coffeen Avenue STE 1200
Sheridan, Wyoming 82801
United States
Support, business, and press: support@arkcentral.com