We may not yet have an agreement on AI “Agent,” but many startups are trying to write a “agent” tool to automate various tasks online. One of these companies, the use of browsers, attracted the attention of developers and investors thanks to the solution that can be “easy to read” for the AI agent.
The use of browsers has raised a significant $ 17 million seed funding round led by Astasia Myers of Felicis with the participation of Paul Graham and Nexus Venture Partners in Techcrunch. The company’s funds have not been reported before.
The use of browser, a part of Y Combinator’s 2025 Winter Batch, has gained a reputation in recent months. The use of Brower from the Virus Building Manus Tool of the Chinese Startup Butterfly Effect made a new height awareness.
Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic founded the use of browsers last year through ETH Zurich’s student project house accelerator. Müller has been studying web scraping tools for many years, met Zunic in 2024, and pairs gained a master’s degree in data science. According to Müller, they came up with the idea of stimulating the browser to combine web scraping and data science to perform tasks.
Müller and Zunic have built a browser demo in five weeks. After that, they opened it.
The use of browser is essentially divided into the button and elements of the website in the form of “text” for the agent. This allows the agent to understand various options and make decisions autonomously.
Müller said, “Many agents rely on a vision -based system and explore the website and start the process through screenshots.” We (website) (website) (website) (website) shifts to what agents can understand. This approach means that you can continue to run the same tasks at a lower cost.
The number of AI companies that want to interact with the agent more elegantly with the website is increasing, and Müller believes that the use of browsers can be a “basic layer” that meets these demands. He added that more than 20 companies in Y Combinator Winter Batch have used browser use for their requirements.
Müller said, “What can the company come to us and say, ‘What can you do so that the agent can explore the website more?’ For example, there is a site like LinkedIn and always changes the way the website works.
According to Myers, Felicis has been actively seeing AI agent spaces for the past few years, and the use of browsers has felt like the right opportunity to grow the company’s portfolio. She said the company’s founding team and open source priority approach were sealed.
Myers to Techcrunch, “We think that web AI Agent is the next pioneer who actually helps the end -to -end automation of human projects.”
