Founder of LocalGhost.ai. Previously co-founder and CTO of CryptoCompare / CCData for twelve years, until it sold to CoinDesk in 2024. I build backends that don't usually fall over and write about why most software is built to own you.
// I love Redis.
What I'm doing now
Building LocalGhost.ai, a local-first, privacy-by-architecture AI platform. Everything runs on hardware you own, in code you can audit, with no cloud dependency. The cypherpunk thesis applied to personal AI, since a model that can't see your data can't sell your data.
Writing the Hard Truths series alongside it. Posts on AI sycophancy, the skills pipeline, founder dynamics, and what happens to a civilisation that adds bureaucracy faster than it adds builders.
Romanian by birth, British by accident, diving and sailing around the world, working out where in the Mediterranean to live next, currently exploring Italy and Greece, with multiple autumns and springs already logged in Lagos, Portugal.
LocalGhost.ai. The only cloud is you.
Your AI, your data, your hardware. A small silent box on your desk that runs the whole stack locally, with no subscription, no telemetry and no backdoor. If LocalGhost the company disappears tomorrow, your box keeps working.
- Fully open source, with every line of code auditable.
- Architecturally blind, since the system prevents us from seeing your data.
- Buy the hardware once from us, or build it yourself from the open BOM.
- Daemons own the control flow and call local models the way another daemon would call Postgres.
- Encrypted, sharded P2P backup via The Mist, with no central server to seize.
Built before
Built CCData with Charlie Hayter from a side project into the largest digital asset data and index provider in the industry, scaling to roughly seventy people across a Go and Node backend, FCA Benchmark authorisation, ISO and SOC 2. Powered indices for VanEck, MSCI, 21Shares, Coinbase and Pantera, and the data feeds powering several spot Bitcoin ETFs. Acquired by CoinDesk in October 2024.
Advisory and technical-diligence work for early-stage founders (Axo Neurotech and zakuro.ai among others) who want to draw on my experience and get a pragmatic view of what they're building.
Financial data, content management, ad systems, the messy plumbing of real businesses, in the years that formed everything I do now. Worked alongside genuinely great people who taught me how to ship, how to think about uptime, and how to tell a useful pattern from a coincidence.
Also built (and hosted on my home server)
A handful of sites for friends, founders, and dive shops. Mostly hand-written, mostly static, mostly fast, all served from a NAS in my flat.
Galápagos Below
PADI dive school on Isabela Island where I finished my Advanced Open Water.
Bruce Anderson
Patreon-monetised memoir platform for the British political journalist.
automat.city
Marketplace networking robots and AI agents into autonomous businesses, from vending machines today to whole city blocks in ten years.
overclock.tech
Marketing site with analytics backend, contact forms and SEO, built end to end.
zakuro.ai
Real-time monitoring and runtime enforcement for autonomous agents in production, so the ones running 24/7 aren't running blind.
YNG HAUS
Photographer portfolio for Andrés Sebastián Gavilanez Sánchez.
Casa Cactus Buenavista
Booking site for a boutique accommodation in Mexico, with gallery and the essentials.
Roxana Duta
Clean, quiet portfolio site for a data analyst.
vladcealicu.com
The one you're reading, also on the NAS.
Writing
Most of what I publish lives on the LocalGhost Hard Truths series. Recurring themes include incentive design, why AI assistants drift toward telling you what you want to hear, what bureaucratic accumulation does to a civilisation, and the part of the software industry no one wants to write about because it would cost them a customer.
Older technical writing on Medium under @vcealicu, mostly crypto data infrastructure from the CCData era.