In 1996, before the cloud had a name and before "AI-ready" meant anything, Rick and David Cantu were carrying refurbished UNIX servers into the basement of a Bellevue, Washington house. They had roughly $1,000 between them and a plan that sounded almost quaint: buy used enterprise hardware, fix it up, sell it with better service than anyone expected. Twenty-nine years later, that basement operation is Redapt - a company that will ship you a data center's worth of physical servers and, in the same conversation, stand up a secure AI platform in the cloud.
Most technology companies pick a lane. You are either the hardware people or the cloud people, the security shop or the data team. Redapt spent nearly three decades refusing to choose. Its own shorthand for what it does is "bare metal to the cloud," and that span - the willingness to touch the least glamorous parts of enterprise IT as well as the flashiest - is the whole story.
01 / WHAT IT DOESThe company that lives in the middle
Redapt is a systems integrator. In plain terms, it is the firm an enterprise calls when it has bought a lot of technology from a lot of vendors and needs it to actually work together. That means designing and racking data-center infrastructure, migrating applications to and between clouds, building data and analytics platforms, wiring up DevOps pipelines, and - increasingly - securing all of it.
The work sits in a deliberately unfashionable place. Nobody writes breathless coverage of the person who makes sure 300,000 servers arrive configured, racked, and shipped on time. But that logistics-heavy, detail-obsessed layer is exactly where Redapt built its reputation - and it is also the layer that the current AI boom quietly depends on. When a model needs GPUs, someone has to source, integrate, and place the metal. Redapt is one of the shops that does.
02 / THE CUSTOMERSWho actually calls them
Redapt is resolutely business-to-business, and unusually private about it - the company does not publish its customer roster, preferring to hand out referrals one at a time. What is public sketches the shape: SaaS providers scaling data-center infrastructure across regions, independent software vendors expanding on Azure, financial-services firms that needed a compliant AI platform, and enterprises deploying edge appliances by the thousand.
One customer, though, is very public. In 2026, Seattle Sounders FC selected Redapt and CrowdStrike to strengthen its cybersecurity ahead of the FIFA World Cup, with Redapt providing strategic advisory and virtual-CISO services. That engagement is less random than it looks: the Cantu family joined the Sounders' ownership group in 2024, alongside the family of former AWS chief Adam Selipsky.
03 / THE PROBLEMWhy "just move it to the cloud" isn't enough
The problem Redapt solves is fragmentation. A modern enterprise runs some workloads on physical hardware it owns, some on AWS, some on Azure, some on Google Cloud, and increasingly wants to run AI models somewhere cost-effective - sometimes back on owned infrastructure, a trend the industry calls repatriation. Each of those layers has its own vendors, its own security model, and its own way of breaking. Stitching them together is expensive, and doing it badly is more expensive.
Redapt's answer is to be vendor-neutral by design. It partners deeply with Dell, NVIDIA, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, but it does not have to defend any single one of them. That posture is the quiet moat: a client can trust that the recommendation isn't just whatever the integrator is most incentivized to resell this quarter.
Bars indicate relative emphasis across practice areas, not audited financials.
04 / THE DIFFERENCEMetal and cloud, under one roof
Plenty of consultancies were born in the cloud and will happily architect your Kubernetes. Fewer of them will also physically build, rack, and ship your servers - and fewer still have been doing the hardware work since the Clinton administration. Redapt's edge is that it never abandoned the metal. When AI shifted the industry's attention back toward GPUs and dense compute, Redapt already had the supply chain, the Dell relationship, and the NVIDIA reseller status to move.
The other differentiator is temperament. Redapt's first stated company value is "serve, not sell." That reads like a poster in a break room until you notice it is a minority-owned, family-run business that has stayed privately held for nearly three decades without a splashy venture round. It grew by keeping clients, not by chasing valuations.
05 / THE PARTNERSThe names on the loading dock
Redapt's partner list is its resume. It is one of Dell's largest Pro-Deploy partners, an NVIDIA reseller for AI hardware, and a certified partner across all three major clouds. In 2024 it added CrowdStrike to the roster on the security side - the same year it acquired the cybersecurity advisory firm Ember River, moving Redapt from "we can deploy your security tools" toward "we can run your security program."
That progression - deploy, then manage, then advise - is Redapt's growth pattern in miniature. Each capability starts as a service attached to hardware or cloud, then matures into a standalone practice. The Ember River deal is the clearest example: a firm that mostly resold and configured security products now runs virtual-CISO engagements, assessing risk and building zero-trust programs for clients who used to only buy boxes.
EXTRAWhat you can actually build with them
Strip away the categories and Redapt's portfolio is a menu of concrete outcomes. A financial-services firm worked with Redapt to build a custom AI platform on Azure OpenAI that transformed how it handled sensitive documents - securely, and inside compliance constraints. A global SaaS provider that could not keep performance consistent across regions had Redapt deliver fully integrated data-center racks with automated logistics, which cut deployment time and opened international markets. An enterprise software company handed Redapt its appliance production and got same-day shipping in return. And an IoT firm needed to manage thousands of micro data centers at the edge - Redapt built the solution to run them.
The people behind this are worth naming. Rick Cantu, the CEO, was recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year in the Pacific Northwest in 2017; his brother David serves as chief marketing officer and has spent the company's entire history spotting emerging enterprise technology early. Around them sits a bench of longtime operators - a CFO who is also COO, a chief security officer with three decades in the field, and a field-CTO team whose job is to translate business goals into architecture. It is a leadership group built for continuity rather than churn.
06 / THE HISTORYTwenty-nine years of not falling in love with one thing
The company's survival is a study in timely pivots. It rode the dot-com hardware boom in the late 1990s, then - when the bubble burst around 2001 - shifted from pure reselling toward services. It moved into cloud adoption and managed services as enterprises started migrating in the 2010s. It built DevOps and modernization practices as containers took over. And it leaned into data, AI, and security as those became the questions every CIO was asking.
The connective thread across all of it: get competent at the next thing before the market decides it matters. That is easy to say and hard to sustain for 29 years, especially without outside capital forcing the issue. Redapt did it by staying close enough to enterprise buyers to hear what was coming.
07 / THE MARKETWhere it fits
Redapt competes in a crowded field of integrators and cloud consultancies - the World Wide Technologys, Insights, SHIs, and CDWs of the world on the scale end, and a swarm of born-in-the-cloud boutiques on the other. Its position is the overlap: big enough to handle 300,000-server logistics, small and independent enough to give an honest, vendor-neutral answer. At roughly 220 people and an estimated $40-60 million in annual revenue, it is not trying to be the largest. It is trying to be the one that still picks up the phone.
For a reader running an enterprise IT roadmap, the copyable lesson is less about Redapt's size than its shape: own the unglamorous middle, stay neutral across vendors, and buy the next capability - as Redapt did with Ember River - a beat before your customers ask for it.
Explore Redapt
Redapt, Inc. · Woodinville, Washington · Founded 1996 · Bare metal to cloud.