Our Investment in Kernel: The Best Browser Infrastructure for Agents

Agents browse the web on our behalf. They promise to save us time and handle nuisance tasks for the businesses and people who deploy them. But today, agent builders struggle to build agents that can navigate the web reliably. Browser infrastructure makes everything a fight to work. They run into walls: poor performance, spotty uptime, unfair pricing, endless authentication hurdles, heavy-handed sanctioning, and an online world that simply wasn’t made for them.

That’s where Kernel comes in. Kernel is a browser-as-a-service API that lets agents use the internet like people do. Kernel’s incredibly fast—spinning up browsers in milliseconds—and ships with live-views and replays so users can see what their agent does and take control when needed. Most notably, Kernel is the first to launch an authentication platform that lets consumers grant agents specific, controlled permissions on their behalf.

Kernel CEO and co-founder Catherine Jue saw the agent infrastructure gap firsthand while leading an engineering team at Cash App. Developers wanted to use agents to QA merchant partner websites at scale, but found themselves bottlenecked. At Kernel, she’s teamed up with CTO and co-founder Rafael Garcia, who previously co-founded education identity infrastructure platform Clever and brings well-honed expertise in building secure identity systems to this new frontier.

I’ve known Catherine for a long time: she was in the same Y Combinator batch as Scale AI (a lucky batch for me!) nearly a decade ago, and I’ve wanted to partner with her ever since. What stands out is her depth, thoughtfulness, and all-in drive (fun fact: Catherine is a former taekwondo world champion!).

We’re leading Kernel’s Series A because Catherine and Raf are the perfect team to build the best browser infrastructure for agents, so we can all benefit. They’ve already made themselves essential to anyone building agents by providing the fastest and most reliable infrastructure. Welcome to the Accel family, Catherine, Raf, and Kernel!