🌗🔥 Plumbers of the AI Revolution

October.

Everyone’s chasing AI, but the real revolution is happening underground - in the systems, data, and infrastructure that make the models work.

This month, we go below the surface with Anders Krohn and Kernel, who is building the plumbing for the enterprise AI era and aiming to create a digital twin of the entire global B2B economy.

Alongside Anders’ bold vision, we celebrate new rounds, new milestones, and new investments redefining what ‘intelligent infrastructure’ really means, from Humaans’ Athena agent to Filigran’s continued rise.

The Snapshot

What’s been lighting up our channels this month:

• Could capital-hungry OpenAI be ready to file for an IPO as early as 2026?
• Who will be the winners in the AI app layer?
• Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warran offer a practical framework to answer the biggest question in tech - is AI a bubble? There is even a dashboard to go with!

Kernel: Plumbers of the AI Revolution

Anders Krohn has always had ‘only one gear’. That’s how he describes himself, and once you hear him talk, you believe it. It’s that single-mindedness that carried him from a student startup in EdTech to leading one of Europe’s most promising enterprise AI companies, Kernel.

Kernel began, as many great companies do, with frustration. Anders and his co-founder spent months ‘crying inside Salesforce,’ trying to make their AI sales product work. They realised the problem wasn’t the technology, it was the data. Enterprise systems were chaotic, inconsistent, and unreliable. The deeper they looked, the clearer it became: AI in the enterprise is a garbage-in, garbage-out problem.

So they pivoted. Away from the hype and into the hard stuff: fixing enterprise data at the root. Today, Kernel gives RevOps teams at companies like Remote, Navan, and Gong the power to trust their CRM. Their entity database acts like a digital twin of the B2B economy, mapping how companies connect so AI can make sense of it all.

Learning the hard way

Anders’ first company, Aula, helped universities bring learning online. It wasn’t a financial win, but it taught him two lessons that now define his leadership: ‘Market selection matters — even great founders can be crushed by slow markets’; and, ‘you have to be honest about who you are as an entrepreneur.’

That honesty runs deep at Kernel. ‘You’ll find people who say working with me made their career go vertical,’ he admits, ‘and others who say it was too much.’ He knows the intensity of the mission isn’t for everyone, and fidelity to that knowledge builds the right team.

Building with humility

At Kernel, humility is a discipline. The team assumes they’re wrong and aims to be wrong fast, working hand-in-hand with customers to feel their pain and adapt. It’s a mindset that’s kept Kernel grounded while many in the AI world chase hype.

‘When I walked around the Agentforce conference,’ Anders laughs, ‘I thought, oh my god, this is going to go so wrong.’ Then, more seriously: ‘Kernel can play a huge part in the solution’.

A global mindset

Like so many of Moonfire’s portfolio companies, Kernel is global from day one, serving U.S. customers from London, not as an exception but by design. Anders loves Europe’s talent and loyal teams, but says its culture must evolve: ‘Capital and talent don’t concern me. It’s culture. You have to be global-first from day one.’

He’s proud of the ‘phenomenal team’ he has built at Kernel and is now hiring senior IC engineers in London, people, as he says, ‘who want to solve large-scale problems with a small team that's moving extremely fast’.

Staying close to the customer

Even after raising $9M in Series A, Anders is still founder-selling. ‘We took founder-led sales very, very far,’ he says. ‘Rather than hire a CRO, I would have to close my eyes, pray for good weather and go through 50 account executives a year.’

Why Moonfire

When it came to choosing an early investor, Anders says Moonfire stood out for one simple reason: the team’s technical engineering expertise. ‘At a meta level,’ he explains, ‘Moonfire was already solving the same kinds of problems we were, just from a different angle.’

That shared technical DNA is a consistent thread through the Moonfire portfolio, and there’s even more that we can do for our founders.

The bold vision

Asked for his boldest 5-year prediction, Anders doesn’t shrink from the task: ‘Kernel will be the digital twin of the entire global B2B economy structured so AIs can talk within it.’

It’s a big vision for an exceptional founder. For Anders Krohn, building Kernel isn’t just about enterprise data. It’s about persistence, continuous learning, customer obsession and the long game of building something that endures.

Qualities we look for in every Moonfire founder.

→ Read the full interview on moonfire.com

→ Watch the highlight on YouTube

→ Learn more at kernel.ai

News

October has been a milestone-packed month across the Moonfire portfolio.

New Investments

• Ambral: AI Account Management Team that builds a continuous, contextual “digital twin” for every customer. → Explore Ambral
• Eunice: AI-powered digital asset due diligence and monitoring for institutional crypto players, regulators, and compliance pros. → Discover Eunice

Portfolio Milestones

• Kernel raises $9M Series A, led by Kinnevik. Anders and his team are just getting started in their audacious mission to build a ‘digital twin of the entire global B2B economy.’ → Learn more at kernel.ai
• Filigran raises $58M Series C. Hard on the tails of our last newsletter and just a year after its Series B, Filigran has raised again. Another example of founder obsession in action: what began as an open-source tool built by Samuel and Julien in their spare time has become a global company serving governments and major enterprise clients. A testament to their relentless focus and flawless execution. → Read the Filigran story
• Humaans announces Athena. The next evolution of the company and the beginning of a new category: Agentic AI for HR, Operations, and Finance. With Athena, Humaans moves beyond a system of record and into a system of execution. They are uniquely equipped to capture the shift to AI-native operations, combining deep expertise in people data, strong enterprise integrations, and a platform architected for scale. Athena accelerates their path to becoming the operating backbone for the AI-driven organisation. → Athena unveiled in Business Insider

Team News

Our recent Technical Founders Summit brought together a room full of builders: founders and engineers swapping hard-won lessons on what it really takes to scale AI infrastructure without burning through your margins.

Venerated infrastructure leader Kelsey Hightower distilled the conversation into five golden rules worth tattooing on our arms:

1. Be your own first user. If you’re selling infra you don’t use, you’ll miss the gaps.
2. Model your unit economics early. Know your input costs line by line, especially inference.
3. Use SaaS until it hurts, then internalise surgically. When a dependency starts eating margin, pull that workload in-house.
4. Avoid the free-credits trap. Max them out, but keep portability.
5. Treat LLMs like infrastructure, not magic. Keep non-deterministic models out of your critical path!

That’s what these gatherings are for: helping our community of builders learn faster, together.

Watchlist

🎙️ Decoded Podcast: Mattias on building enduring funds for exceptional founders

Coming later this month…

Keep an ear out for Mattias’s upcoming conversation with host Alfie Whattam on the Decoded Podcast, about building an authentic, multigenerational fund for the inception stage.

He shares Moonfire’s principles: stay small and aligned, leverage technology, and back exceptional, spiky, polymath founders with a touch of messianic belief and deep customer obsession!

The Moonfire Team