Kenji Murakami spent eight years as a data infrastructure engineer at a mid-size logistics firm in Yokohama, watching the same problem repeat itself: every department had its own database, its own export schedule, its own definition of what a 'customer' was. When the finance team's numbers disagreed with the operations team's numbers, someone would spend three days reconciling spreadsheets instead of making a decision. Kenji left in the spring of 2019 to build the tool he wished he had had.
The first version of Meshblend was a command-line connector that could join two PostgreSQL instances and expose a unified view over HTTP. It was rough, but it worked well enough that two former colleagues at the logistics firm started using it within a month. By the end of 2020, Kenji had brought on two engineers from his network. Sato Hiroshi, who had been building ETL pipelines at a Nagoya manufacturer, and Tanaka Yuki, who had spent four years on query optimisation at a database consultancy in Shinjuku. The three of them rewrote the core from scratch over one winter.
Kenji Murakami is the founder and CEO of Crag Mesh Blend. He trained as a systems engineer at Waseda University and spent eight years building data infrastructure at a logistics company in Yokohama before founding Crag Mesh Blend in 2019. The specific frustration that pushed him to start the company was a three-day spreadsheet reconciliation exercise that should have taken thirty minutes. He keeps a small whiteboard above his desk in the Kofu office where he sketches query plans by hand before writing any code. His preferred tool for debugging is still a terminal and a cup of Kyoto-roasted drip coffee.