Kernel builds fast cloud browsers for AI agents — 200K browsers spun up, 1,000% revenue growth month-over-month

Okay, good luck to you. Scaling up. Hopefully you can scale up. Thanks so much for meeting. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you. If you're just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025 and we have our next guest coming into the studio. Welcome. It's Colonel time. Welcome to the show.

You seem fired up. Did you just pitch yourself? Uh we haven't pitched yet. Who are you? What do you do? Um Raph Garcia, uh founder of Kernel. We're crazy fast browsers in the cloud for your AI agent. The browser wars. The browser wars are on these basically computer use. So it's API to go and interact with the website.

Yeah. So nowadays a lot of AI agents, you want to hook them up to the exact same tools that humans use. Yep. And the browser is one of the main tools that we use on a day-to-day basis. And so we're powering automations in healthcare, fintech, QA, lots of different use cases that uh AI is really good at.

Um walk us through kind of the history of the market because I know there was there used to be this company I'm blanking on the name, but they were doing like browser they had a browser use product and they were venturebacked, but they never really like broke out.

It feels like this market has just like exploded in size or less. Prior to LLM's, the main use case was you run your tests uh or your QA on on a on a browser, a headless browser in the cloud. Um but as soon as AI came on the scene, uh tools got supercharged by this intelligence. You could connect to them. Yep.

So, uh you know, I I experienced this firsthand. I I founded a company called Clever back in 2012. That was uh No way. Uh we were I think we might technically in the same batch.

Um and we our first piece of code we wrote was a browser automation to pull uh data out of uh student information system a killer company by the way you should look it up massive acquisition massive deal size gone size gone what was the number 500 million there so yeah both both me and my co-founder are previous YC founders so we are uh experienced at the game uh and yeah I was previously a a quant at a high frequency trading firm so like speed is the name of the Will you be our if you want to make your browser infrastructure super fast I will help you.

I will be most subscribed as the round. Uh it's extremely and it's over. Yeah. Overally over uh I mean it is a hyper competitive space. I I saw even AWS launch something. It seems like something obviously AWS would have a product. Uh how how are you thinking about competition in the long-term market structure?

Are you thinking it's even a winner or take all market or is this igopoly like what we saw with cloud where AWS, GCP, Azure, these are all great businesses?

Yeah, I think you know with dev tools I think there's an opportunity for companies to come into the space and just be laser focused on the technical quality of the product. You see this with like Planet Scale and RDS.

You know, Amazon has a competitor that like, you know, has a huge market share, but Planet Scale is like eating their lunch when it comes to mind share and and uh some bigger customers like there's a lot of examples of like so we're we are like infra nerds like trying to make browsers super fast in the cloud and I don't think there the lengths we are going to do that like AWS is going to be years behind uh whatever we're we're working on.

So how are the bakeoffs going? the bake offs are going well. So we, you know, we we did YC and, you know, YC is now like five or six thousand companies. So it's a huge uh early adopter market to kind of launch and sell into.

Uh but now we're starting to see uh deals come on that are, you know, Fortune 500 uh more enterprise deals. Um so yeah, size gong is is going off in the office. Uh and yeah, we're we're seeing really good revenue growth over I guess a thousand% you could call it month over month. uh 400% uh usage month over month.

We've spun up like 200,000 browsers uh in the last 3 months. So um yeah, things are things are going well. Fantastic. Uh we How big is the team today? Uh we're six full-time. So hiring a lot of people I worked with at Clevver and uh and yeah.

No, I love I I love when a founder comes in, put runs it back, does it like they did it the first time, like goes back through YC, and then just puts on a master class. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The the the mistake, and I don't know if you'll agree, the mistake is like, okay, I could have done the next I'm going to I'm going to incubate 25 different things. I'll be at the beach for the next, but I'd like you to build things as hard. And they completely forget how hard it is at the early stage.

That's the value of going through YC again is like the partners put you in that mindset like okay you actually have to do things that don't scale. You have to build a product something wants. Right. Yep. Yeah.

Just you you could have done the whole like raise 50 million, get the really crazy office out the gates and then and then you wouldn't you you got to earn it every time. You got to earn it every time for sure. Uh well speaking of people who earned it, who is your favorite entrepreneur in history?

Um who do you look to favorite entrepreneur? How far back are we going? We can go live or dead. Literally thousands of years if you want. You can go. Somebody has somebody has mentioned Jesus Christ. Somebody has mentioned Eric Lyman at RAM. So I mean I didn't make the comparison but it was made today.

I mean cliche I'll have to go Steve Jobs. I mean I I grew up reading that was Jordy's answer too and studying Apple. Like that was my first computer as a kid. So I I got to shout out to Steve. I said Edwin Land Steve Jobs mentor. But it's not anyway. Uh second question.

How did you make your first dollar online or in business? Um, I mean, do you count uh trading futures as a quan? Wait, is there a more noble way to make your first dollar? Like, what are we talking about? I mean, that was my first job out of college. Fantastic. That's my quant. Anyway, congratulations.

Congratulations on the progress. Come back on the show as you have more news. When you're ready to announce the round, jump on. We're very excited. Uh, anyway, we will bring in our We have what? 10 minute countdown. 10 minutes. Come in. We're in the lightning round. Who