We could not have an agreed-upon definition of AI “agent” but, however a large number of startups need to create “agentic” instruments to automate numerous duties on-line. One such agency, Browser Use, has attracted a ton of curiosity from builders and traders due to its resolution that makes web sites extra “readable” for AI brokers.
Browser Use informed 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, 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 software drove consciousness to new heights.
Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic based Browser Use final yr by way of ETH Zurich’s Pupil Mission 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 information science. Collectively, in line with Müller, they got here up with the concept of mixing net scraping with information science to immediate a browser to carry out a process.
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 a web site right into a extra digestible, “text-like” format for brokers. This helps the brokers perceive the completely different choices and make choices autonomously.
“Lots of brokers depend on vision-based techniques and attempt to navigate web sites by way of screenshots, and in [the] course of, issues break,” Müller mentioned. “We convert [websites] into one thing brokers can perceive. This strategy means we will run the identical duties repeatedly at a less expensive price.”
There’s an growing variety of AI corporations that need to make their brokers work together with web sites extra gracefully, and Müller thinks Browser Use can turn out to be 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 mentioned. “There are websites — for instance, LinkedIn — that change the way in which the web site works on a regular basis, so brokers typically fail on websites like these.”
In response to Myers, Felicis has been actively wanting on the AI brokers area for the previous a number of years, and Browser Use felt like the proper alternative to develop the agency’s portfolio there. She mentioned that the corporate’s founding staff — and its open-source-first strategy — sealed the deal
“We predict net AI brokers are the following frontier that actually helps with the end-to-end automation of human duties,” Myers informed TechCrunch. “[W]eb AI brokers are this dynamic bridge between static pre-trained fashions which might be principally text-focused within the ever-changing digital panorama.”
