Founders/Kenneth Rhee

Kenneth Rhee

Kenneth Rhee is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Neuron Industries, the El Segundo, California company behind the Cortex AIC, the AI-native industrial controller that works in place of the PLC. He leads the company's software: the real-time runtime, the Synapse IDE, and the AI systems that turn plain-English process descriptions into deterministic, testable control code.

Role · Co-founder & CTO Based in El Segundo, CA Company · Neuron Industries (YC S26)

A decade of mission-critical software

Before founding Neuron Industries in 2026 with Dennis Ren, Rhee spent a decade building software where failure is expensive and visible.

At Amazon, he worked on Elastic Block Store, the block storage service underneath much of AWS that handles trillions of I/O operations a day, and on the Silk browser for Fire TV. Amazon is also where he first met Dennis Ren.

At GOAT Group, he built the seller-marketplace systems: pricing and listing infrastructure serving more than 600,000 sellers and transacting hundreds of millions of dollars. Earlier, at Dassault Systèmes' Medidata, he worked on regulated clinical services.

Founded & Bootstrapped WorkIPO

In between, Rhee founded WorkIPO as a solo founder, bootstrapped it without outside capital. WorkIPO built mission-critical enterprise ERP, MES, and CRM systems for industrial clients, including the manufacturing execution system used at Freeform, the metal 3D-printing company where Dennis Ren was founding electrical engineer. That collaboration is what led to Neuron.

Why Neuron

The thesis behind Neuron Industries is that controls engineering deserves the tooling software engineering already has, and that the controller itself has to be rebuilt for it.

“Software engineering got 30 years of continuous innovation: version control, testing, code review, and fast feedback. Controls engineering got almost none of it, and it is running the physical world. The goal is to enable engineers to develop industrial hardware at the speed of software.”

Kenneth Rhee · launch announcement, August 2026

At Neuron, that thesis is the product: describe a machine's behavior in plain English and get deterministic, real-time Python, with unit tests, behavior simulation, version control, and a historian built into the controller. Read how it holds up on a production machine in the CureWood retrofit case study.

Education

Rhee studied computer science at the University of California, Irvine, where he took 1st place in the Butterworth Product Development Competition and founded the App Dev Club.

Press & appearances

Meet the other half of Neuron Industries.

Dennis Ren, co-founder and CEO: founding electrical engineer at Freeform, Apple's Vision Pro founding System EE team, Amazon Go, and Tesla Fremont.

Dennis Ren, Co-founder & CEO Back to the site