Why We Built Ember Light Thicket
Stay safer online. Simple tools, real peace of mind
Ember Light Thicket started in 2019 after our founder, Margaret Inoue, watched her mother receive three scam calls in a single week. Her mother was sharp, careful, and not easily fooled, but the callers were persistent and the scripts they used were genuinely convincing. Margaret had spent fifteen years working in network security for a mid-size software firm in Osaka, and she knew exactly what was happening. What she did not have was a simple tool she could hand to her mother and say: this will help, and you do not need to understand how it works.
The first version of Ember Light Thicket was built on a kitchen table over two weekends. It was rough. The alerts were too technical, the font was too small, and the setup process required reading a twelve-page manual. Margaret tested it with six people from her mother's neighbourhood group in Kobe, and every single one of them got stuck at step three. That was the lesson. The technology was not the hard part. Making it genuinely usable for someone who did not grow up with computers was the real challenge, and it took another eighteen months of testing, rewriting, and listening before the product felt right.
Margaret Inoue spent fifteen years in network security at a mid-size software firm in Osaka before founding Ember Light Thicket in 2019. The trigger was personal: her mother, living alone in Kobe, received three scam calls in a single week. Margaret built the first prototype on a kitchen table, tested it with her mother's neighbourhood group, and rewrote it almost entirely after watching six people get stuck at step three. She holds a degree in information systems from Ritsumeikan University and spends her weekends hiking the Rokko mountain range. Her guiding principle: if your grandmother cannot use it without calling you, it is not finished yet.