We might not have an agreed-upon definition of AI “agent” but, however a mess of startups need to create “agentic” instruments to automate varied 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 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, a part of Y Combinator’s 2025 winter batch, has gained notoriety in latest 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 12 months via ETH Zurich’s Scholar Undertaking Home accelerator. Müller had been engaged on web-scraping instruments for years, and met Zunic in 2024 whereas the pair have been getting their grasp’s levels in knowledge science. Collectively, in response to Müller, they got here up with the thought of mixing net scraping with knowledge science to immediate a browser to carry out a job.
Müller and Zunic constructed a Browser Use demo in 5 weeks — and it took off. Subsequently, they open-sourced it.
Browser Use basically 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.
“Quite a lot of brokers depend on vision-based techniques and attempt to navigate web sites via screenshots, and in [the] course of, issues break,” Müller mentioned. “We convert [websites] into one thing brokers can perceive. This strategy means we are able to run the identical duties time and again at a less expensive price.”
There’s an rising variety of AI corporations that need to make their brokers work together with web sites extra gracefully, and Müller thinks Browser Use can change 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 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 line with Myers, Felicis has been actively trying on the AI brokers house for the previous a number of years, and Browser Use felt like the precise alternative to develop the agency’s portfolio there. She mentioned that the corporate’s founding crew — and its open-source-first strategy — 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 might be principally text-focused within the ever-changing digital panorama.”
