We may not An agreed definition of AI “agent” But many startups want to create “agent” tools to automate various tasks online. A company like this, Browser usagebecause its solutions make the website more “readable” to AI agents, it has attracted interest from developers and investors.
Browser users told TechCrunch it has raised $17 million in seed financing led by Felicis’s Astasia Myers and joined with Paul Graham of Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. The company’s funds have not been reported before.
Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch processing part of browser use has been infamous for recent months. China initiates the use of the butterfly effect in its Virus Manus tool Raise awareness to new heights.
Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic founded the browser last year through House Accelerator, the student program of Eth Zurich. Müller has been working in web tailoring tools for many years and met Zunic with Zunic in 2024, while the two received their master’s degree in data science. According to Müller, they proposed the idea of combining web scraping with data science to drive browsers to perform tasks.
Müller and Zunic built a browser usage demo in five weeks – it took off. Then, they opened source.
The use of browsers essentially breaks down the buttons and elements of the website into a more digestible proxy “text-style” format. This helps agents understand different options and make decisions automatically.
“Many agents rely on vision-based systems and try to navigate through screenshots and on the website [the] The process, things broke down,” Mueller said. “We convert [websites] Going into an agent can understand something. This approach means we can run the same task again and again at a cheaper cost. ”
With more and more AI companies wanting to make agents interact with websites more elegantly, Müller believes that browser use can become the “basic layer” that meets this need. He added that more than 20 companies in the current Y-combination winter batching are used for their own requirements.
“Some companies come to us and say, ‘What can we do to make it easier for agencies to browse on our website?'” Mueller said. “For example, there are sites (such as LinkedIn) that keep changing the way the website works, so agencies often fail on sites like this.”
According to Myers, Felicis has been actively researching the space for AI agents over the past few years, and the use of browsers feels like the right opportunity to grow a company portfolio there. She said the company’s founding team and its open source-first approach reached a deal
“We think Web AI proxy is the next area that really helps end-to-end automation of human tasks,” Myers told TechCrunch.[W]EB AI Agent is this dynamic bridge between statically trained static pretrained models that are primarily text-centric digital landscapes. ”
