Hey YC, we’re Brian and Bernard, and we’re building Kestral, your AI Work Prioritizer!

TLDR; We make it clear what matters most to your customers and your business to guarantee your work has impact. (how? gotta read more)

https://youtu.be/R8Q5qOWRv2I

❌ The Problem 😟

Companies spend too much money on Sales and R&D teams just for them to 🥤suck🥤 at communicating with each other and this costs millions of dollars in blocked deals, churned customers, and time wasted on irrelevant roadmaps.

There’s gold in customer data in all its forms, yet even the most revered companies we talked to commonly lose sight of blockers and spend hours updating spreadsheets of feature requests.

📣 “We have deep anxiety if we’re deploying our product teams appropriately…” - C-Suite @ a Public Company
📣 “All my calls… in Gong. Feature requests … in Notion. We’ve got Salesforce. Why, in 2025, am I still grepping around for feature requests like a caveman?” - Head of Sales @ a Series B Startup
📣 “… we’re tracking feature requests on spreadsheets” - GTM @ a Major LLM Provider

Companies KNOW they should do better… but without the right tools, they are:

• Getting outmaneuvered by competitors by failing to adapt to customer trends as they come up
• Wasting hours manually tracking and escalating tasks that end up sitting in a backlog
• Worrying if users will care about their “strategic investments”.

💭 📖 The Solution

We instantly bridge this divide between customer-facing roles and product development by:

1. Extracting ALL actionable tasks from a variety of sources (transcripts, Slack/Discord messages, GitHub issues…)

2. Consolidating duplicate asks and prioritizing them by theme

3. (optionally syncing to project management platforms like Linear/Notion until we displace them…)

4. Closing the loop with them, so you go from feature launch to immediate customer engagement & guaranteed impact

We’re building teams of AI agents that:

🤖 - understand the context of roles, projects, companies, and customers

🤖 - rank work on various heuristics like opportunity size, effort, and team goals

🤖 - make direct connections between customer asks and R&D’s work

🤖 - personally follow up with users or revitalize the pipeline to guarantee a positive business impact of work

Our technology can also easily transition to save orgs countless hours by eliminating work about work, like updating the state of tasks from meeting transcripts/messages and giving status updates while reprioritizing.

🤜💥🤛 The Team

(pre-YC vacation together in Jeju)

We’re close friends since college and multiple-time founding members of prior startups. We recently crossed paths at Asana, where Brian was an AI Tech Lead, while Bernie led Enterprise Authorization projects.

We’re leveraging our experience to combine the cutting edge of memory and knowledge base management with AI Agent Permissions for Enterprise to build the future of work.

We fully understand that work management structures are crucial to providing the necessary context for AI to deliver real enterprise value, and we’re not scared of any existing players in this space.

💡 The Opportunity

Our mandate is to disrupt the work management industry that has a $50B TAM, but we’re starting first by truly understanding and prioritizing what a company works on. As agents get better and commoditized, we aim to be best positioned to help companies get the work done faster.

The existing tools in this space can charge 5-6 figures a year for speculative and limited insights from customers at best, and they don’t even make the connection to R&D’s real work. We can instantly help validate/derisk costly roadmap plans, as well as help companies adapt to their customers’ needs immediately, providing millions in value.

We’re also personally seeing some very large investments (millions) in hiring teams to build internal systems to try to connect impact to work that is still manual at heart. Our partner said that if you’re seeing someone build something painful just for themselves… you’re on to something.

🟠 CALLING THE YC COMMUNITY 🧡

We’d love to meet more of you!
🗣️ In a CRO, Sales, GTM, or Customer Success role, and want your requests prioritized?
🗣️ Product Leader wanting to validate your strategy and get measurable results?
🗣️ Building the latest in AI knowledge bases and memory?

Let’s talk!

Would appreciate any warm intros to the above as well! We’re looking for partners to grow with us to become the most efficient, most actually customer-centric companies in the world.

Hit us up at founders@kestral.team or book a demo call, even if you’re just a little curious at https://kestral.team