Sovereign intelligence for the physical economy.
Kernwall builds the operating system that lets fabs, factories and defense suppliers run open-weight AI on hardware they own, with no connection out and the evidence an assessor needs to accredit it. We are early and founder-led, and this page says exactly how early.
What we believe
Three bets behind the company.
Each one decides what we build first and what we refuse to build.
Models get removed. The machine shouldn't have to be.
In October 2026 DHS ordered DeepSeek out of US federal civilian systems, including products built on it. In March the Pentagon labelled a US frontier-model vendor a supply-chain risk. The OS is designed to swap the model without re-accrediting the machine under it.
The evidence chain is the product, not the kernel.
Immutable Linux is no longer rare. What no one ships is the unbroken chain from a signed boot measurement, through a signed GPU driver and a provenance-checked, eval-gated model, to a record an auditor accepts, carried across the gap in one bundle.
Start where buyers move fastest.
Fabs, factories and defense suppliers first: they buy on commercial timelines and already accept appliances. Ministries and classified enclaves follow in years two and three, on the references and certificates the first sites produce.
Founder
The founder built the hard core before.
Kernwall starts from systems the founder built in earlier roles. The new work is the part no one sells as a product yet.
Mantas Kandratavičius
Founder · Entrepreneur First alumnus
German factories
As Head of R&D at an edge-AI company, built secure-boot, verity-protected Linux with signed A/B updates that roll back automatically, mTLS device PKI and a fleet manager. Its AI inspection stations have checked over 900,000 wheels on the line.
European semiconductor fab
Built the AI core of a factory-floor knowledge platform in production there: hybrid RAG with cited answers, video-to-SOP, and a real-time voice agent that files maintenance work orders.
Defense procurement
CTO of a defense-procurement AI startup: rebuilt its AI core in 13 weeks, turning tender documents into cited requirements.
- Prior systems were built by the founder before this company. They are not Kernwall customers.
- UEFI secure boot and mTLS device PKI
- Verity-protected immutable root filesystem
- Signed A/B updates with automatic rollback
- Fleet manager for factory AI stations
- TensorRT inference on the edge
- Hybrid RAG with cited answers, in production
- Real-time voice agent, in production
- Signed NVIDIA and AMD GPU driver lifecycle under kernel lockdown
- Cross-gap bundle: OS, drivers, models and attestation as one signed artifact
- Model provenance scanning and eval-gated promotion
- Accreditation evidence engine (OSCAL, SCAP, SBOM, audit chain)
- Certifications, on a dated public roadmap
Where we stand
What exists today, stated plainly.
Security buyers check claims for a living. This is the list we would want to read.
- Product
- Kernwall OS is pre-release. The first release is built with a design-partner cohort of five.
- Customers
- None yet. The deployments named above are the founder's prior work, not Kernwall customers.
- Demos
- Front-end simulations, each labelled on the page where it runs
- Certifications
- None held. They appear only as a dated roadmap with a status per item.
- Hardware
- A planned compatibility list of OEM servers (Dell, HPE, Supermicro, Lenovo, NVIDIA-Certified Systems); no OEM partnership announced
- Research
- 12 field notes behind the site's claims, each source dated, with what it corrected in our own earlier material
- This website
- No analytics, trackers or third-party scripts; fonts are self-hosted
Forward-deployed engineers: people who install, harden and accredit appliances on customer sites, inside the wall, alongside the site's security team. Not open yet; roles will be listed here when they are.
Work with us
Bring one site to the first cohort.
The design-partner programme is the way in today: one site, one workload, a 90-day pilot on your own hardware.