Catherine Jue

Catherine Jue is co-founder and CEO of Kernel, a company in San Francisco, California, that runs cloud browsers for AI agents and automated tests. She started it in 2025 with Rafael Garcia, who was earlier co-founder and chief technology officer of the education software company Clever. Kernel went through Y Combinator in summer 2025.

From Sway Finance to Cash App

Jue co-founded Sway Finance, an AI bookkeeping startup, and went through Y Combinator with it in 2016. “Everyone was promising that AI was going to reinvent the future,” she wrote on her blog about that time. Sway did not work out. She later led Cash App's team of forward deployed engineers and its docs platform, and her team built one of the first ChatGPT-based internal tools at Block.

She left Cash App in 2025 because the pace of AI had changed her mind about timing. “The older I grow, the more convinced I am in my naive 22 year old's belief that AI will reinvent the future,” she wrote.

Agents need to click

Kernel began with an open-source project that put Chrome on a unikernel that boots in milliseconds. It reached the front page of Hacker News. Jue's case for the company is that agents need the same interfaces people use. “APIs and MCP servers are great when they're available, but 95% of the internet only exists as websites,” she wrote in a post on Kernel. “Most things we use in our day-to-day lives still live behind logins, forms, dashboards, and buttons. Agents need to click them.”