Engineering team around a table

Kerf closes Series Seed: building the agent layer for the discrete-manufacturing economy.

Byadmin

Today we are announcing that Kerf has closed Series Seed financing. We are not disclosing the amount or the syndicate composition publicly — both are documented in the data room available to qualified buyers and partners. We are using the round to extend the agent platform across two new agent classes, triple our deployment engineering bench, and complete our SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audits, which are both currently in progress.

Why now

For 18 months we operated as a four-person engineering team running 11 production deployments at discrete manufacturers across aerospace, defense, medical-device, energy, and industrial automation. We did this on the deliberate constraint that we would not raise venture capital until we had shown that the agent platform produced compounding outcomes — not just first-quarter wins.

We crossed that threshold in Q1 this year. Three of our customers expanded from one agent to four. Two customers brought us into adjacent business units. And — the metric we look at hardest — our customer churn over 18 months is zero.

What we are spending on

  • Two additional agent classes. One commercial-side, one operations-side. Names announced when the first customer ships them.
  • Deployment engineering. Tripling the customer engineering bench. Our deployment ramp is four weeks because we run it ourselves; we are growing the bench rather than handing the work to channel partners.
  • Compliance audits. SOC 2 Type II audit closes Q3. ISO 27001 closes Q4. CMMC Level 2 begins Q4 for our defense-subprime customers.
  • Single-tenant infrastructure. Expanded VPC-private deployment options for ITAR-aware customers and customers handling protected technical data.

What we are not spending on

We are not spending the round on a marketing engine. Kerf is sold to operations engineers, plant managers, and CFOs by people who have been operations engineers, plant managers, and CFOs themselves. We will not be at conferences. We will not be sponsoring podcasts. If you want to evaluate Kerf, the path is unchanged: request a demo and one of our engineers will run it with your data.

If you are a contract manufacturer who has been quoted ten different “AI for manufacturing” pitches and you are tired of dashboards: come see what an agent looks like when it actually does the work.

— The Kerf team