In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen (Essence VC) and Ian Livingstone (Keycard) sat down with Catherine Jue, co-founder and CEO of Kernel, to explore the cutting-edge world of browser infrastructure for AI agents.
Catherine shares her journey from Cash App to founding Kernel, explaining how she discovered the critical need for scalable browser automation when AI agents need to interact with the web. The conversation dives deep into the technical innovations behind Kernel's use of unikernels and micro VMs, which enable blazingly fast browser startup times (20ms vs 30+ seconds) and unique snapshot/restore capabilities.
Catherine discusses the evolution from deterministic browser automation to truly agentic behavior, the challenges of optimizing for variable web workloads, and her optimistic vision for an AI-powered future where the pie expands rather than consolidates. This episode is packed with technical insights about infrastructure, agent tooling, and the future of how software interfaces will evolve in an agent-native world.
0:24 Catherine's startup journey and founding Kernel
1:30 Cash App's OpenAI experiment sparks the idea
3:56 Why browser infrastructure for AI agents?
6:36 Unikernels: 20ms startup vs 30+ seconds
15:02 Optimizing for variable web workloads
23:25 Future of agent-native software
32:05 Hot takes!
