The Infra Pod From 30 Seconds to 20ms: Solving Browser Speed for AI Agents (Chat with Catherine from Kernel)
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Feb 23, 2026 Catherine Jue, co-founder and CEO of Kernel, builds browser infrastructure for AI agents using unikernels and microVMs. She explains how unikernels enable 20ms startup and snapshot/restore for ultra-fast browser automation. The conversation covers long-lived browser state, optimizing for bursty web workloads, moving from scripted automation to agentic browsing, and how browsers bridge the transition to agent-native software.
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Cash App QA Sparked Kernel's Browser Focus
- Catherine discovered agent browser needs while at Cash App when a QA team used vision models to audit partner e-commerce sites.
- That team automated checks like logo presence across thousands of merchant sites, which was infeasible with brittle Playwright/Selenium scripts.
Unikernels Cut Browser Cold Starts To Milliseconds
- Unikernels and micro VMs enable extremely fast browser startup and snapshot/restore capabilities.
- Kernel ran Chromium on Unicraft unikernel to achieve ~20ms startup vs typical 30+ second Chrome cold starts.
Avoid Warm Pools By Using Snapshot Restore
- Use snapshot/restore to avoid expensive warm pools and eliminate long cold-start latency for on-demand browser sessions.
- Kernel pre-spawns browsers, snapshots them to disk, then wakes them in ~20ms so idle cost is minimal.