
Launch video: https://youtu.be/HA2YziEBMVw
Founded by Raman Varma & Evan Chopra
Hey everyone, meet Raman (pictured on the right in the photo above) and Evan (pictured on the left) from Kestrel 👋
Raman and Evan were founding engineers on Illumio’s Kubernetes team, where they built distributed systems to secure clusters for Fortune 500 companies.
Raman previously worked on ML systems research at Sky Lab and BAIR. Evan was a security researcher during his Master’s in Computer Science, focusing on the Signal Protocol.
Running Kubernetes at scale is chaos.
As founding engineers on the Kubernetes Security team at Illumio, Raman and Evan saw both startups and large organizations struggle with its complexity and scale. For example, network policies are so tricky that many teams default to allowing everything, and even basic ops tasks like debugging failed rollouts mean spending hours digging through logs and events just to find where things went wrong.
Over time, this complexity compounds and clusters begin to drift - configs diverge, policies break, and “temporary” workarounds become production. And when something goes wrong, engineers are buried under alerts and reports from disconnected tools, trying to debug blind at 3 a.m.
Kestrel is redefining how teams manage Kubernetes with the first agentic platform that unifies ops and security. It replaces manual triage with autonomous investigations and human-in-the-loop remediations - so issues that used to take hours to debug can be understood and fixed in seconds.
💬 AI Chat Assistant: Investigate any Kubernetes issue across all of your clusters in plain English - skip the complex queries and context switching, and get answers with ready-to-apply YAML fixes from a single point of command.
🚨 Incident Response: Kestrel continuously monitors your clusters to detect incidents, trace root causes, and generate YAML fixes that can be applied with a single click. It's like having a dedicated on-call SRE team - without the burnout or headcount.
🌐 Topology Map: Visualize your Kubernetes infra with classified intra-cluster, cross-cluster, and external traffic overlaid in real time.
⚠️ Risk Assessments: Launch a swarm of specialized AI agents that discover vulnerabilities and provide exact remediation steps across network security, RBAC, privilege escalation, container image security and more. Validate fixes with a single click.