We would possibly not have an agreed-upon definition of AI “agent” but, however a mess of startups wish to create “agentic” gear to automate more than a few duties on-line. One such company, Browser Use, has attracted a ton of passion from builders and buyers due to its answer that makes internet sites extra “readable” for AI brokers.
Browser Use advised Techmim that it has raised a large $17 million seed investment spherical led through Felicis’ Astasia Myers with participation from Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Project Companions. The corporate’s investment hasn’t prior to now been reported.
Browser Use, a part of Y Combinator’s 2025 wintry weather batch, has won notoriety in contemporary months. Chinese language startup Butterfly Impact’s use of Brower Use in its viral Manus device drove consciousness to new heights.
Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic based Browser Use closing yr thru ETH Zurich’s Scholar Undertaking Area accelerator. Müller were running on web-scraping gear for years, and met Zunic in 2024 whilst the pair had been getting their grasp’s levels in information science. In combination, in line with Müller, they got here up with the speculation of mixing cyber web scraping with information science to instructed a browser to accomplish a role.
Müller and Zunic constructed a Browser Use demo in 5 weeks — and it took off. Therefore, they open-sourced it.
Browser Use necessarily breaks down the buttons and parts of a web site right into a extra digestible, “text-like” layout for brokers. This is helping the brokers perceive the other choices and make choices autonomously.
“A large number of brokers depend on vision-based techniques and check out and navigate internet sites thru screenshots, and in [the] procedure, issues wreck,” Müller mentioned. “We convert [websites] into one thing brokers can perceive. This manner manner we will run the similar duties time and again at a less expensive value.”
There’s increasingly more AI corporations that wish to make their brokers have interaction with internet sites extra gracefully, and Müller thinks Browser Use can transform a “elementary layer” serving this want. He added that greater than 20 corporations within the present Y Combinator Wintry weather batch used Browser Use for their very own necessities.
“There are corporations coming to us and pronouncing, ‘What are we able to do to make it more uncomplicated for brokers to navigate our web site?’” Müller mentioned. “There are websites — as an example, LinkedIn — that vary the way in which the web site works always, so brokers regularly fail on websites like the ones.”
Consistent with Myers, Felicis has been actively having a look on the AI brokers house for the previous a number of years, and Browser Use felt like the appropriate alternative to develop the company’s portfolio there. She mentioned that the corporate’s founding staff — and its open-source-first manner — sealed the deal
“We expect cyber web AI brokers are the following frontier that actually is helping with the end-to-end automation of human duties,” Myers advised Techmim. “[W]eb AI brokers are this dynamic bridge between static pre-trained fashions which are most commonly text-focused within the ever-changing virtual panorama.”
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