Why Kestral Could Be the Operating System for Modern Work
Kestral is a San Francisco-based startup on a mission to transform how businesses identify, prioritize, and act on high-impact work—particularly across the traditionally disconnected worlds of Sales and R&D. Founded in 2025 by longtime friends and Asana alums Brian Kim and Bernard Xie, Kestral is building an intelligent AI system that ensures companies always work on what truly matters.
With a vision to “engineer clarity into chaos,” Kestral addresses a critical and recurring problem in the $50 billion work management market: the communication gap between customer-facing teams and product developers. The result? Blocked deals, churned users, and roadmaps full of misaligned priorities. Kestral’s AI-powered prioritization engine aims to bridge this gap and finally close the loop between customer demand and product delivery.
What Problems Does Kestral Solve?
In almost every modern company, there's a misalignment between what customers want and what R&D teams are building. Sales and customer success teams gather feedback during calls, meetings, and email exchanges, but this data is often scattered across platforms like Gong, Notion, Slack, or Google Sheets. Meanwhile, product teams plan roadmaps based on limited visibility into that customer intelligence, often wasting months on features that don’t move the needle.
Kestral’s founders heard this pain loud and clear:
“We have deep anxiety if we’re deploying our product teams appropriately…” — C-Suite at a public company
“Why, in 2025, am I still grepping around for feature requests like a caveman?” — Head of Sales, Series B startup
Companies are either drowning in unstructured feedback or manually tracking it with spreadsheets. This siloed approach delays valuable insights, duplicates work, and results in millions lost in opportunity cost. Kestral’s goal is to eliminate this misalignment altogether.
How Does Kestral Work?
Kestral operates through a smart stack of AI agents that specialize in turning noisy customer input into focused, impactful action items. Here’s how the system works:
- Ingesting Customer Data:
The platform pulls in data from calls (e.g., Gong transcripts), chat (e.g., Slack, Discord), CRMs (e.g., Salesforce), emails, and support tickets to build a comprehensive customer feedback pipeline. - Extracting Actionable Insights:
Agents analyze this unstructured data to identify feature requests, deal blockers, and customer suggestions, tagging each by frequency, sentiment, and relevance. - Consolidation & De-duplication:
Kestral consolidates duplicate asks, organizes them thematically, and connects them to broader product goals. - Prioritization by Impact:
AI agents then evaluate each task based on business impact, urgency, strategic alignment, and technical feasibility, ensuring product teams focus on the most leveraged work. - Closing the Loop:
Once the feature is shipped, Kestral enables automatic follow-up with customers who originally requested it, turning passive feedback into customer delight and potential revenue.
Unlike traditional project management tools, Kestral’s agents understand context: the structure of your organization, the goals of different teams, and even historical product decisions. That’s what allows them to not just organize work, but to orchestrate it.
Who Are the Founders Behind Kestral?
Brian Kim and Bernard Xie are not only co-founders—they’re longtime friends and proven operators. Having previously worked together at Asana, they led efforts in AI workflow automation and enterprise authorization. Brian, a triathlete and former AI Tech Lead, combines deep engineering expertise with startup grit. Bernard brings his experience as a two-time founding engineer and CTO with a knack for systems design.
Their bond and aligned vision allow them to move fast and decisively. The two even took a pre-YC vacation together in Jeju, Korea—a sign of trust and shared ambition that underpins their venture.
What Is the Technology Behind Kestral’s AI Agents?
Kestral’s platform leverages proprietary AI agents designed with a deep understanding of work context and organizational structure. These agents:
- Understand roles and hierarchies (e.g., product managers vs. engineers)
- Interpret business objectives (e.g., ARR targets, product launches)
- Calculate opportunity cost (e.g., deal size vs. dev hours)
- Automate status updates and task reprioritization directly from internal communication logs
- Enable seamless integration with tools like Linear, Notion, or GitHub
As these agents grow more sophisticated, they can replace a significant portion of “work about work,” freeing teams to focus on actual value creation.
What Market Opportunity Is Kestral Targeting?
Kestral is poised to disrupt the enormous $50B+ work management software market, which is currently dominated by tools like Asana, Jira, and Monday.com. While these platforms organize workflows, they often fail to prioritize the right work, especially in fast-moving environments where customer sentiment can shift rapidly.
Moreover, enterprises are already spending millions on internal teams just to manually manage the flow between Sales and Product. Kestral replaces these expensive, inefficient pipelines with automated intelligence, generating clear ROI by reducing churn, accelerating sales cycles, and optimizing roadmap investments.
As AI agents become more powerful and ubiquitous, Kestral is positioned to be the control center that makes sense of it all, making them not just another tool, but the operating system for high-leverage work.
How Is Kestral Different From Other Tools?
Most work management tools assume companies already know what to work on. Kestral challenges that assumption. By identifying what actually matters—backed by real customer voice and aligned with strategy—Kestral sits upstream from tools like Notion or Linear.
It’s not just about project planning—it’s about priority engineering.
Unlike generic LLM assistants or spreadsheet automations, Kestral’s AI agents have domain-specific awareness. They:
- Recognize the difference between a high-value feature request and a “nice to have”
- Tie product work directly to sales impact
- Follow up with customers proactively
- Ensure roadmap decisions aren’t guesswork, but evidence-driven
In essence, Kestral is replacing layers of middle management coordination with AI agents that understand what the business needs to succeed.
What’s Next for Kestral?
Kestral’s founders see today’s product as just the first step. In the long run, they envision a broader AI-led transformation in how work gets done. As AI agents become more advanced and personalized, Kestral aims to become the hub that orchestrates everything, from task creation and project planning to impact measurement and customer communication.
The team is already seeing strong resonance from C-suites, heads of sales, and product leaders at growth-stage companies and enterprises alike. And with deep technical experience and a shared hunger to redefine the space, Kestral is well-positioned to become a foundational layer in the enterprise software stack.
Why Should Companies Pay Attention to Kestral?
The stakes are high. Companies that fail to respond quickly to customer feedback or that misallocate resources fall behind. In an age where AI-native startups can outmaneuver incumbents in months, clarity, speed, and alignment are no longer optional.
Kestral helps businesses unlock their greatest asset—customer insight—and turn it into actionable, high-impact work. For companies tired of spinning their wheels, managing sprawling spreadsheets, or watching deals slip away because of miscommunication, Kestral offers a compelling and much-needed solution.
As Brian and Bernard put it: “We’re not afraid of the existing players. We know what they lack. And we’re building what the future of work truly needs.”