Browser Use, the tool making it easier for AI ‘agents’ to navigate websites, raises $17M
We may not yet have agreed definition of AI “agent”, but want to make a multitude of startups “agent” tools to automate different tasks online. Such a sturdy, Use of browserHas attracted a lot of interest from developers and investors thanks to the solution that makes websites more “readable” for AI agents.
Browser use told WAN that it has collected a considerable $ 17 million seed financing round, led by Felicis’ Astasia Myers with the participation of Paul Graham, a capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. The financing of the company has not been reported before.
Browser use, part of the Winterbatch of Y Combinator 2025, has become known in recent months. The use of the use of brower effect of the Chinese startup butterfly effect in his viral manus tool brought consciousness to new heights.
Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic founded the use of browser last year via Eth Zurich’s Student Project House Accelerator. Müller has been working on web-scraping tools for years and met Zunic in 2024 while the couple took the degrees of their master in data science. According to Müller, they came together the idea of combining web scraping with Data Science to ask a browser to perform a task.
Müller and Zunic built browser use in five weeks – and it started. Then they opened it.
Browser use essentially breaks down the buttons and elements of a website in a more digestible, “text-like” format for agents. This helps the agents to understand the different options and make decisions autonomously.
“Many agents rely on vision -based systems and try to navigate websites through screenshots, and in [the] Process, breaking things, “said Müller.” We convert [websites] In something that agents can understand. This approach means that we can perform the same tasks over and over again at a cheaper costs. “
There is an increasing number of AI companies that want their agents to communicate with websites, and Müller thinks that browser use can become a “fundamental layer” that meets this need. He added that more than 20 companies in the current Y combinator used Winterbatch browser use for their own requirements.
“Companies come to us and say:” What can we do to make it easier for agents to navigate our website? “, Said Müller.” There are sites – for example LinkedIn – that change the way the website always works, so agents often fail on sites like that. “
According to Myers, Felicis has actively looked at the AI agent space in recent years, and felt the use of browser as the right opportunity to grow the company’s portfolio there. She said that the founder of the company and the open-source-first-approach-the deal was sealed
“We think that web AI agents are the next boundary that really helps with the end-to-end automation of human tasks,” Myers told WAN. ‘[W]EB AI agents are this dynamic bridge between static pre-trained models that are usually text-oriented in the ever-changing digital landscape. “
