Stefan Kalb, a Seattle entrepreneur who previously founded grocery technology startup Shelf Engine, has returned with a new venture aimed at democratising artificial intelligence access for mid-market companies lacking technical expertise.
Kalb is co-founder and CEO of Super Labs, which launched in September and has raised $8 million in a seed funding round led by Seattle-area venture firm FUSE. Other backers include Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Liquid 2 Ventures, Soma Capital, and others.
Kalb stated the idea for Super Labs emerged after he repeatedly received calls from people running “non-tech businesses” seeking to understand how to implement AI.
“If you’re non-technical, and you’re trying to move into the AI space, it’s really hard,” Kalb stated.
Super Labs operates as both a marketplace and an implementation partner. The platform allows business owners to describe their problems, “I need to stop manually tracking project hours across three spreadsheets,” for example, then visualises their workflows and identifies where AI can be integrated.
The company does not typically build the AI solutions itself. Instead, it connects businesses with existing AI vendors, such as voice AI tools, and handles the complex integration work that would normally require technical expertise.
Kalb sees substantial opportunity in the mid-market segment, which he indicated is larger than the S&P 500 in economic terms. His concern is that without platforms like Super Labs, these companies will fall behind as enterprise customers gain access to AI tools.
“The mid-market companies are going to get screwed,” he stated.
On the supply side, Super Labs provides a marketplace for developers to distribute their AI products through usage-based models, offering exposure to non-tech customers they otherwise could not reach.
For now, Super Labs is focused on proving its model with early customers in manufacturing, e-commerce, distribution, and retail, businesses that have “all these different workflows that can be automated,” Kalb noted.
Super Labs enters a crowded field of AI consultants and implementation firms. It competes against agent directory platforms such as Gumloop and Langflow, and enterprise software marketplaces such as Vendr and Tropic. Kalb stated his company differentiates with its marketplace approach and focus on security and reliability.
Kalb co-founded Super Labs with Jared Kofron, who was a principal software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs and previously worked at Flux, Rover, and Glowforge.
Kalb’s first entrepreneurial experience was founding Molly’s, a healthy food company that supplied salads and sandwiches to Seattle-area cafes and hospitals. That brick-and-mortar experience exposed him to the operational challenges of traditional businesses. “I would have dreamed of having Super Labs,” he stated.
Shelf Engine, his next venture, applied AI to reduce food waste in grocery stores by predicting optimal ordering quantities for perishable goods. The company worked with major retailers like Kroger, Target, and Dollar General before its acquisition by retail data company Crisp earlier this year.
Shelf Engine raised more than $60 million from investors and secured celebrity endorsements but later went through redundancies. Kalb characterised it as a “disappointing acquisition.”
Kalb indicated he plans to be more deliberate about scaling Super Labs than he was with Shelf Engine, where rapid hiring led to challenges.
Other backers in Super Labs include Massive Tech Ventures (Kalb’s own venture fund), Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Pioneer Fund, and longtime technology leader Gokul Rajaram.
The launch of Super Labs addresses a fundamental asymmetry in the AI adoption landscape where large enterprises with substantial technology budgets and in-house expertise can rapidly integrate AI tools, whilst mid-market companies lacking these resources struggle to implement even basic automation despite potentially greater proportional benefits from efficiency gains.
The $8 million seed funding led by Seattle-area venture firm FUSE, with participation from prominent investors including Y Combinator’s CEO Garry Tan, signals investor confidence in the mid-market AI implementation opportunity. The diverse investor base spanning traditional venture firms, accelerator leadership, and individual technology executives suggests broad recognition of the market gap Super Labs aims to fill.
Kalb’s observation that mid-market companies “are going to get screwed” without accessible AI implementation reflects genuine competitive concerns. As large enterprises automate processes and gain efficiency advantages through AI, mid-market competitors operating with manual workflows face widening productivity gaps that could prove insurmountable over time.
