About Us
Built on care. Rooted in legacy.
The Meaning of Mālama
In Hawaiian, mālama means to care for, to protect, to preserve.
It is a word spoken with intention — used when caring for the land (mālama ʻāina), for one another (mālama kekahi i kekahi), and for the things passed down through generations. It carries the weight of stewardship: a quiet promise that what matters will be tended to, not forgotten.
That is the spirit behind Mālama Co. Every account organized, every photo preserved, every legal safeguard put in place — it's all an act of mālama. Not just of files and passwords, but of the people who will one day inherit them.
For our family, mālama isn't an abstraction. My wife and young child are Hawaiian, and she lives the word every day as a nurse caring for her community in Kona. This name was chosen with her in honor of what mālama means in practice, and the standard it asks us to hold this work to.
Founder
Darryl DeRaedt
Founder, Mālama Co
"Mālama Co was born from real loss, two family members, gone within days of each other. We were lucky we knew the passwords. But standing in the middle of that grief, helping piece together accounts and logins, I kept asking myself: what if we hadn't? That question became this company."
Meet Darryl
The person behind the work.
Darryl DeRaedt founded Mālama Co after years of helping older family members untangle their digital lives — scattered accounts, forgotten passwords, photos buried across a dozen devices with no clear plan for what happens next. He saw the problem up close, long before he understood how urgent it really was.
Then he lost two close family members within days of each other. In the middle of that grief, his family found themselves navigating account logins and recovering access, hoping nothing critical was locked away forever. They were fortunate, the passwords were known, the accounts were reachable. But Darryl couldn't stop thinking about the families who aren't so lucky. The financial accounts no one can get into. The photos no one can find. Years of a life, one forgotten password away from being lost.
Mālama Co is the answer to that question, and it's built on a foundation few in this space can offer. Darryl spent over a decade as a Vice President of Operations leading a highly regulated technology platform processing hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly transactions across 19 jurisdictions, where security, compliance, and the careful handling of sensitive data weren't best practices but legal requirements. Before that, he served thirteen years as a sworn reserve police officer, holding a degree in psychology and working directly with vulnerable adults and the families who care for them. The combination is unusual and it's exactly what this work demands. Trust earned through accountability. Operational rigor learned in regulated environments. And a quiet patience built from years spent with people during the hardest moments of their lives.
Mālama Co is built to be the opposite of impersonal tech, a hands-on, white-glove practice that treats every client's digital life with the care a family heirloom deserves. Every audit, every legacy setup, every photo preserved is done personally. Because when the time comes, the people you love shouldn't have to fight for what you meant to leave them.