We might not have an agreed-upon definition of AI “agent” but, however a large number of startups wish to create “agentic” instruments to automate numerous duties on-line. One such agency, Browser Usehas attracted a ton of curiosity from builders and traders because of its answer that makes web sites extra “readable” for AI brokers.
Browser Use advised TechCrunch that it has raised a large $17 million seed funding spherical led by Felicis’ Astasia Myers with participation from Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Enterprise Companions. The corporate’s funding hasn’t beforehand been reported.
Browser use’s web site.
Browser Use, a part of Y Combinator’s 2025 winter batch, has gained notoriety in current months. Chinese language startup Butterfly Impact’s use of Brower Use in its viral Manus instrument drove consciousness to new heights.
Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic based Browser Use final yr by means of ETH Zurich’s Scholar Challenge Home accelerator. Müller had been engaged on web-scraping instruments for years, and met Zunic in 2024 whereas the pair had been getting their grasp’s levels in knowledge science. Collectively, in keeping with Müller, they got here up with the thought of mixing net scraping with knowledge science to immediate a browser to carry out a activity.
Müller and Zunic constructed a Browser Use demo in 5 weeks — and it took off. Subsequently, they open-sourced it.
Browser Use primarily breaks down the buttons and parts of an internet site right into a extra digestible, “text-like” format for brokers. This helps the brokers perceive the completely different choices and make choices autonomously.
“Plenty of brokers depend on vision-based methods and try to navigate web sites by means of screenshots, and in (the) course of, issues break,” Müller stated. “We convert (web sites) into one thing brokers can perceive. This method means we are able to run the identical duties repeatedly at a less expensive price.”
There’s an rising variety of AI corporations that wish to make their brokers work together with web sites extra gracefully, and Müller thinks Browser Use can develop into a “basic layer” serving this want. He added that greater than 20 corporations within the present Y Combinator Winter batch used Browser Use for their very own necessities.
“There are corporations coming to us and saying, ‘What can we do to make it simpler for brokers to navigate our web site?’” Müller stated. “There are websites — for instance, LinkedIn — that change the best way the web site works on a regular basis, so brokers usually fail on websites like these.”
In response to Myers, Felicis has been actively trying on the AI brokers area for the previous a number of years, and Browser Use felt like the suitable alternative to develop the agency’s portfolio there. She stated that the corporate’s founding workforce — and its open-source-first method — sealed the deal
“We predict net AI brokers are the following frontier that basically helps with the end-to-end automation of human duties,” Myers advised TechCrunch. “(W)eb AI brokers are this dynamic bridge between static pre-trained fashions which are principally text-focused within the ever-changing digital panorama.”
