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Catherine Jue Is Building the Browser Layer AI Agents Need
After bookkeeping, payments, tea and a world title in Taekwon-Do, Catherine Jue found her next hard problem hiding in plain sight: the browser. At Kernel, she is turning it into infrastructure that AI agents can use at production scale.
Kernel
Kernel is a San Francisco startup building browser infrastructure for AI agents and web automations. Its cloud browsers launch in a few hundred milliseconds, persist login state across workflows, and evade bot detection, letting developers point agents at the live web without operating their own browser fleet. Backed by Accel and Y Combinator, Kernel raised $22M and says it is used by thousands of teams building agents, including Cash App and Rye.
Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson is an American tech entrepreneur who built and sold Braintree (the parent of Venmo) to PayPal for $800 million, then funneled the proceeds into venture firm OS Fund and neurotech startup Kernel. He is now best known for Blueprint, a personal protocol and commercial brand built around his 'Don't Die' philosophy, chronicled in the 2025 Netflix documentary 'Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.'
Brendan Gregg
Brendan Gregg is an Australian systems performance engineer at OpenAI, where he works on datacenter optimizations for ChatGPT. He invented flame graphs and the USE Method, pioneered eBPF observability, and is the author of landmark books including 'Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud'. His work is credited with saving the industry over $1 billion in compute costs. Previously an Intel Fellow and performance engineering leader at Netflix, Gregg is one of the most influential engineers in Linux and cloud infrastructure.