Stardrift is an AI travel planner that helps users find and book flights, hotels, and activities through a conversational interface. They serve both business travelers who need real-time flight data like Starlink wifi availability and delay notifications, and leisure travelers planning end-to-end trips. They're backed by Y Combinator (S24).
Travel is one of the most fragmented industries on the web. Unlike Stripe for payments, there’s no dominant player with a clean API for all the services available. To build AI agents that can do what a traveler would do themselves, Stardrift needs to pull data from dozens of sources: airline databases, transit operators, government registries, hotel aggregators. Browser infrastructure sits at the core of that.
Problem: Self-hosting browsers that break more than they work
Before Kernel, Leila had tried two approaches to browser infrastructure and hit walls with both.
First was Browserbase. Cold starts took 30 seconds to a minute. Cloudflare challenges worked roughly 20% of the time, and getting access to advanced stealth required an Enterprise plan at $1,000 per month. For a small startup scraping a handful of sites once a week, that cost was impossible to justify.
Next was self-hosting on Modal. The team paid for five always-warm browser containers to cut down on startup time. But browser workloads are spiky on CPU and memory, and nobody on the team wanted to monitor that. They were also using low-quality residential proxies that added latency and unreliability. Eventually, they had to wind down their flight data scraper.
“We actually ended up shutting down that scraping service because it was so brittle and it kept breaking. Self-hosting is kind of a pain.”
Leila Clark, CEO & Founder, Stardrift
Even for a founder who knows the browser infrastructure space deeply and has built scrapers from scratch at previous companies, maintaining this stack wasn’t a good use of time. The technology moves constantly, and keeping up with it is a full-time job that pulls focus from building the actual product.
Solution: Selecting Kernel over Browserbase and Modal
Leila needed managed browser infrastructure with fast cold starts, built-in stealth and proxies, and good observability for debugging, without paying enterprise pricing or managing infrastructure.
Kernel checked every box. Cold starts dropped from 30+ seconds to roughly 30ms. Stealth and residential proxies are included out of the box, so there was no separate bill and no configuration. Session replay and live views, which are difficult to build when self-hosting, came built in.
Compared to Browserbase, Kernel handled Cloudflare challenges more reliably on the first try, without requiring an Enterprise plan. Compared to Modal, Kernel eliminated the need to provision containers, manage CPU and memory spikes, or source third-party proxies.
“It’s really nice to just be able to spin up Kernel and have it work. In particular, session replay and monitoring is really difficult if you self-host, and Kernel having that out of the box is great.”
Leila Clark, CEO & Founder, Stardrift
Results: Reliable data aggregation with 0 infrastructure overhead
Today, Stardrift runs its travel data aggregation on Kernel. The team no longer manages browser containers, proxy configurations, or flaky Chromium instances. They pay roughly the same amount they were spending on Modal, but get significantly more: faster cold starts, built-in stealth, proxies, and session replay.
With browser infrastructure off their plate, the team is focused on expanding their product. They’re rolling out flight delay notifications, Starlink wifi tracking, and planning to build automated airline check-in. All of it will run on Kernel.
“Even though I know how to build all of this, it’s just not our comparative advantage. Kernel handles the infrastructure so we can ship features faster for our travelers.”
Leila Clark, CEO & Founder, Stardrift
If you’re a startup aggregating data across the web and tired of managing your own browser fleet, let us handle it. It just works.
