Onboard in a few hours, no setup from your team
Kerno indexes your codebase and dependencies and generates its first test baseline without any setup work from your team.
Kerno for Startups
Become the category leader
Ship fast without looking in the rear-view mirror
Agents and engineers at these companies use Kerno
Meet Kerno
Your team’s AI expert backend tester
Kerno plugs into the coding agent your team already uses and starts testing against your real stack from day one. No dedicated QA hire, no test suite to babysit.
Zero ongoing maintenance, evolves with your product
It retires stale scenarios and writes new ones as your code changes, so the suite never drifts from what’s actually true.
Regression and security checks, integrated with your E2E tests
It runs against your live stack and real dependencies, not mocks, catching what static review and unit tests miss.
Full coverage
Every layer of your backend, tested on every change.
Functional API workflows
Verify endpoint behavior, multi-step request sequences, coordinated service interactions, and integration patterns.
Contract & schema validation
Validate request and response structures, data types, required fields, serialization rules, and version compatibility.
Authorization & authentication
Review token validation, role-based access rules, permission scopes, session handling, and all credential-related flows.
Error handling & resilience
Validate status codes, error body formats, retry behavior, backoff procedures, timeout handling, and controlled fallbacks.
Boundary & edge cases
Validate payload size limits, pagination behavior, null or empty values, malformed inputs, and constraint-based validation.
Security · OWASP Top 10
Validate broken object- and function-level authorization, injection, excessive data exposure, mass assignment, and SSRF.
MCP server testing
Verify each tool your MCP server exposes, including returned content, structured output, schema conformance, and error handling.
AI agent testingSoon
Verify how your agent calls tools, chains model steps, and handles streaming responses, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and others mocked for deterministic runs.
Speed
Move faster without breaking things
Speed is the whole game at your stage. Kerno removes the tradeoff between shipping fast and shipping broken, so your best engineers spend their time on the roadmap instead of the review queue.
6×Faster merges for PRs tested by Kerno
48%More runtime issues caught
10hFreed up per engineer, every week, to build
Every new hire focuses on shipping
New engineers ship against a verified baseline from day one, instead of first learning the quirks of your test suite.
Increases trust in every code change
Every change is validated before it reaches a pull request, so reviewers have less to check and fewer breaks reach production.
Fast-track or skip code review
When Kerno confirms a change matches the baseline, reviewers can wave it through instead of re-checking it by hand.
Security testing
Get ahead of your first security compliance review
Your first enterprise deal will come with a security questionnaire whether or not you’re ready for one. Continuous regression and security testing on every change gives you evidence toward PCI, SOC 2 Type 2, and ISO 27001, before an auditor ever asks.
PCI
Payment endpoints are tested for broken access control, injection, and data exposure on every change.
SOC 2 Type 2
Type 2 asks for evidence over time. Kerno records a dated test run for every change.
ISO 27001
Your access control and input validation rules become scenarios Kerno reruns on every release.
Get started
Full coverage in under a day
Install Kerno, get full test coverage, and roll out to your team without any friction. Set up once. Zero ongoing maintenance.
In the first hour
01
Install and calibrate
Point Kerno at your repo. It maps every endpoint, connects to your live services, and calibrates to how your backend runs.
› kerno init
Indexed 2,410 files · 103 endpoints mapped
Environment connected
SUTlocalhost:8000
PostgreSQLlocalhost:5432
RabbitMQlocalhost:5672
Calibrated 6 areas
AuthenticationAPI tokensSeedingWrite landminesTenancyInfrastructure
3 custom rules recorded
In the first day
02
Fully cover your backend
Kerno creates an extensive suite of baseline tests that capture how each API, task, and event behaves today.
Backend coverage100%
Request APIs
HTTP612 tests
GraphQL143 tests
gRPC118 tests
Async & events
TasksCelery187 tests
MessagesRabbitMQ74 tests
Events22 tests
1,156 scenarios · 62 min
In the first week
03
Roll out to your team
The Kerno MCP connects to your agents, validating every code change and catching runtime issues before they reach production.
Kerno MCP connected
Pricing
At a fraction of the cost of an FTE QA hire
Redeploy your QA budget to shipping faster.
[ Kerno for Startups ]
$50$25/ dev / month50% off
- Eligibility
- Pre-Series A, under $2M revenue in the past 12 months
- Price lock
- Two years
Everything in Kerno Pro
- Unlimited test runs
- Unlimited repositories
- Unlimited users
- Team and codebase analytics
- CI integration
Customers
Teams shipping with Kerno
Kerno was up and running in minutes with no manual work, and it made our API migration so much smoother. We could instantly validate that every change made by Cursor worked the way we expected, and now it’s a core part of how we build.
Using Kerno with Claude Code has been a game changer. You get quick feedback with no manual effort, and it saves you a lot of time and hassle debugging integration issues post-merge.
Kerno saves us a lot of manual work and helps us catch side effects and issues that would definitely break our projects’ backends. Our engineering team loves it.
FAQs
Got any extra questions? Reach out on our community channel and we'll be happy to help.
How long does it take to get started?
About an afternoon. Install Kerno, let it baseline your backend, and connect your team. You get full coverage in under a day, and Kerno keeps the suite current with zero ongoing maintenance.
What happens when Kerno flags something that isn’t actually a bug?
You decide. Kerno shows the diff and asks whether the change was intended — approve it and the baseline updates to match, or reject it and fix the code. Confirmed behavior is never flagged again.
Does Kerno replace hiring a QA engineer?
It replaces the manual grind of writing and maintaining regression, security, and integration tests by hand. Most early-stage teams use it to delay their first QA hire and redeploy that budget into shipping instead.
Is our code safe with Kerno?
Kerno encrypts everything end to end and never retains your code. A SOC 2 Type 2 audit is in progress, and your private code is never stored or used to train models.
How is pricing structured for startups?
Kerno for Startups is $25 per developer per month — 50% off Kerno Pro for pre-Series A startups with under $2M revenue in the past 12 months — locked in for your first two years.