Was there a premine when Kaspa launched?

No — there was no premine when Kaspa launched, and no group held mining hardware that gave them an unfair head start. A premine is when developers or insiders mint coins for themselves before opening the network to the public; Kaspa explicitly avoided this. The external group that had been developing specialized optical mining hardware dissolved before it produced anything, and DAGlabs (the original for-profit development entity) also dissolved. As a result, anyone could mine Kaspa on equal footing from day one using standard CPUs or GPUs. This matters because a fair launch is one of the strongest signals that a cryptocurrency network was not set up to enrich its founders at the community's expense.