About Kerf
Built by people who have shipped manufacturing software.
Kerf was founded in 2024 in Boston by operators who’d spent the prior decade inside the systems that run the world’s manufacturers — PLM at PTC, agentic workflows at Bright Machines, industrial deployments at Palantir Foundry. We watched mid-market shops drown in operational ping-pong: chasing PO confirmations, redrafting NCRs at 9pm, hand-walking ECOs through five departments.
Every incumbent kept selling them more dashboards. Dashboards observe. We wanted software that acts — and that takes responsibility for what it does, with sign-off where it counts.
Founder + CEO
Marcus Chen
MIT MechE ’08, Stanford MS Industrial Engineering ’11. Six years at PTC on Windchill PLM, where he shipped the workflow-automation engine used by 200+ aerospace and medical-device customers. Four years at Bright Machines leading the agentic-workflow team for electronics contract-manufacturing customers.
Founded Kerf in 2024 after watching mid-market shops keep buying dashboards while their operations engineers worked weekends. Marcus’s POV is on the home page: dashboards observe; agents act.
Reach Marcus directly: marcus@kerf.com
The team
Engineers, ex-MES operators, former QEs. We hire for shop-floor instinct first.
Priya Sundaresan
CTO + co-founder
Stanford CS PhD in multi-agent systems. Five years at Palantir Foundry on industrial deployments — steel, semiconductors. Three years at Markforged building the AI quality team.
[VP Engineering — placeholder]
VP Engineering
Leads agent platform engineering. Bio to be added — replace this card with real hire before going live.
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VP Customer Engineering
Leads deployments at customer sites. Ex-MES integrator. Replace this card with real hire before going live.
How we work
Operating principles
- Sign-off where it counts. Agents act on production-impacting changes only with human approval. We log every decision, every approval, every override.
- Fitted, not generic. Each customer gets agents calibrated on their playbook — vendor tone, escalation rules, disposition matrix. We don’t ship the same prompt to two shops.
- We say no-bid. If your stack is too custom or your operations too ad-hoc to deploy cleanly in a quarter, we’ll tell you. Better than a stalled rollout.
- Quality is a contract, not a feature. SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST 800-171, ITAR-aware deployment for customers who need it. Single-tenant US-only when production data demands.
- Boring software for serious operations. No AI hype copy. Read what the agent did. See why. Override if you need to. Move on.