About KamiwazaAI — Our Story & Team

Our Story

We Built This Because We Needed It

In 2019, Luke Norris and Priya Mehta were both working inside large enterprise organizations, watching the same pattern play out. Teams would build impressive AI prototypes — impressive demos, real potential — and then spend the next six months trying to wire them into production systems. Monitoring was an afterthought. Governance didn't exist. The "orchestration layer" was a tangle of cron jobs and custom glue code.

The problem wasn't the AI. The problem was that nobody had built the infrastructure to run AI reliably at enterprise scale.

KamiwazaAI started as an internal tool to solve that problem. By the time it was working well enough to deploy internally, three other companies had asked to use it. That's when they knew it was a product, not just an internal project.

The company is venture-backed and headquartered in San Francisco's SOMA district. The team is small — deliberately. We believe in building the right thing before building the big thing.

KamiwazaAI team collaborating in San Francisco office

What We Stand For

Three Things We Won't Compromise On

Reliability

Enterprise teams can't afford AI systems that drift, hallucinate in production, or fail silently. Every design decision we make starts with: what happens when this breaks, and how fast will you know?

Transparency

Every agent action, every model call, every pipeline step should be visible, auditable, and explainable. Not just to engineers — to compliance, to legal, to the people who need to sign off.

Developer Experience

The best enterprise software disappears into the workflow. We obsess over the experience of the engineers building on KamiwazaAI — clean APIs, clear error messages, documentation that actually tells you what you need to know.

The Team

Small Team. Deep Experience.

We're a focused group of engineers and product builders who've run AI infrastructure at scale before starting KamiwazaAI.

Luke Norris

Co-founder & CEO

Former platform engineering lead. Built AI infrastructure for two enterprise SaaS companies before starting KamiwazaAI in 2019.

Priya Mehta

Co-founder & CTO

ML systems engineer with a background in distributed systems. Previously led model deployment at a Series B fintech before co-founding KamiwazaAI.

James Chen

Head of Engineering

Platform and reliability engineer. Spent four years building high-throughput data pipelines before joining to lead the KamiwazaAI core runtime.

Sofia Rivera

Head of Product

Enterprise product manager with a focus on developer tooling. Shapes the KamiwazaAI roadmap around the problems engineering teams actually bring to us.

Come Work With Us

We're growing and we're deliberate about it. If you care about AI infrastructure done right, we'd like to hear from you.

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Built in SF to Make Enterprise AI Manageable