Spotlight: Startup vet launches Latch to liberate humanity ‘from doing work that owns us’

What happens here matters everywhere. by John Cook on Sep 10, 2026 at 2:57 pm September 10, 2026 at 2:57 pm Seattle startup veteran Stefan Kalb is back with a fresh brand and an ambitious vision for enterprise automation in the AI era.

Rebranded earlier this year from Super Labs , Kalb’s latest venture, Latch, is positioning itself as the context layer for enterprise AI, helping companies observe, learn and document how work actually gets done.

Kalb launched the startup alongside co-founder and CTO Jared Kofron , a University of Washington physics alum and former principal software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs last year. Kalb is well known in startup circles.

In 2009, the Bainbridge Island resident founded Molly’s, a fresh food supply company that serviced Seattle-area cafes and hospitals. That led him to start Shelf Engine, which used machine learning to drastically reduce food waste for retailers like Target, Kroger and Walmart.

After raising $60 million in venture funding, it s old to New York retail data analytics company Crisp in 2025. What problem are you obsessed with solving? Liberating people from work they don’t like. Every job has hours in it that only exist because software never learned how the company runs.

I want that work to disappear, and I don’t think anyone will miss it. What surprised you after talking to customers? That people are bad at explaining their own jobs, and they know it. Ask someone to document their process and you get a five-step list.

Watch them do it and it’s forty steps with a dozen decisions they never mention, because to them it isn’t a decision. It’s just Tuesday. How has AI changed the way you build? The obvious stuff is real, but the interesting change is org shape. The ratio of product to engineering has flipped.

So has the ratio of SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) to closers. Building used to be the bottleneck, so you staffed for it. Now the bottleneck is deciding what to build and who to sell it to, and you staff for that instead. What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup? They think we’re Loom.

A Loom is a video in a folder waiting for a human to watch it. Latch watches the recording, figures out what you did and why you did it that way, and turns it into something your agents can act on. The video is the input. What we learn from it is the product. Toughest decision in the past year? Go to market.

AI made reaching customers harder and more expensive, not easier. Every inbox is full of AI-written outbound now, so the cheap channels are gone. We decided to stop competing on volume and spend real money on fewer, deeper conversations. Showing up in person.

It costs far more per account than we planned for, and it’s the only thing that works. One piece of advice for other entrepreneurs? Look away from the obvious. If someone is telling you about the front of their store, ask them about the loading bay.

The best problems are the ones nobody is talking about, usually because they can’t put words to what’s happening. That’s also where you’ll have the least competition. Thanks for subscribing! Check your inbox to confirm your subscription.