Browser Use Raises $17M to Revolutionize AI Agents' Web Navigation

Browser Use, the tool making it easier for AI 'agents' to navigate websites, raises $17M | TechCrunch

We may not have an agreed-upon definition of AI "agent" yet, but a multitude of startups want to create "agentic" tools to automate various tasks online. One such firm, Browser Use, has attracted a ton of interest from developers and investors thanks to its solution that makes websites more "readable" for AI agents. Browser Use told TechCrunch that it has raised a sizable $17 million seed funding round led by Felicis' Astasia Myers with participation from Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. The company's funding hasn't previously been reported. Browser Use, part of Y Combinator's 2025 winter batch, has gained notoriety in recent months. Chinese startup Butterfly Effect's use of Brower Use in its viral Manus tool drove awareness to new heights. Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic founded Browser Use last year through ETH Zurich's Student Project House accelerator. Müller had been working on web-scraping tools for years, and met Zunic in 2024 while the pair were getting their master's degrees in data science. Together, according to Müller, they came up with the idea of combining web scraping with data science to prompt a browser to perform a task. Müller and Zunic built a Browser Use demo in five weeks -- and it took off. Subsequently, they open-sourced it. Browser Use essentially breaks down the buttons and elements of a website into a more digestible, "text-like" format for agents. This helps the agents understand the different options and make decisions autonomously. "A lot of agents rely on vision-based systems and try and navigate websites through screenshots, and in [the] process, things break," Müller said. "We convert [websites] into something agents can understand. This approach means we can run the same tasks again and again at a cheaper cost." There's an increasing number of AI companies that want to make their agents interact with websites more gracefully, and Müller thinks Browser Use can become a "fundamental layer" serving this need. He added that more than 20 companies in the current Y Combinator Winter batch used Browser Use for their own requirements. "There are companies coming to us and saying, 'What can we do to make it easier for agents to navigate our website?'" Müller said. "There are sites -- for example, LinkedIn -- that change the way the website works all the time, so agents often fail on sites like those." According to Myers, Felicis has been actively looking at the AI agents space for the past several years, and Browser Use felt like the right opportunity to grow the firm's portfolio there. She said that the company's founding team -- and its open-source-first approach -- sealed the deal "We think web AI agents are the next frontier that really helps with the end-to-end automation of human tasks," Myers told TechCrunch. "[W]eb AI agents are this dynamic bridge between static pre-trained models that are mostly text-focused in the ever-changing digital landscape."

Browser Use raises $17M to help steer AI agents through the internet - SiliconANGLE

Browser Use raises $17M to help steer AI agents through the internet Agentic artificial intelligence startup Browser Use believes it can play a critical role in helping so-called AI agents navigate the web after closing on a $17 million funding round Saturday. Felicis Ventures led the round, which also saw participation from A Capital, Nexus Ventures, Y Combinator, Paul Graham, Liquid2, SV Angel, Pioneer Fund and other investors. The startup's tool, also called Browser Use, has attracted tons of attention from developers of AI agents, which are AI systems that can complete tasks autonomously on behalf of users, because it gives them a key capability - it lets them browse the internet in the same manner as humans do. Browser Use helps to make the web more "readable", which is handy for AI agents because it happens to be the world's largest source of unstructured information by a long way. It's also constantly being updated, which means it's probably the number one source of fresh information too. However, navigating the web is a tricky proposition for AI agents, for it involves tasks like moving a mouse cursor, clicking on buttons, filling in forms and so on. Most AI agents rely on computer vision-based methods to "see" websites and try to work their way through them. But such techniques are slow and expensive, and they don't always work very well, Browser Use's co-founder Magnus Müller (pictured, left) explained in an interview with TechCrunch. "A lot of agents rely on vision-based systems and try and navigate websites through screenshots, and in [the] process, things break," he said. "We convert [websites] into something agents can understand. This approach means we can run the same tasks again and again at a cheaper cost." In a nutshell, what Browser Use does is convert each website into structured text that large language models are able to process in a deterministic way. This means they can understand the different options available to them on each web page, allowing them to decide what to do more easily. The startup says the result is that AI agents can browse through the web much faster, interacting with different user interface elements more precisely. The startup has emerged from nowhere. Just a few months ago it didn't even exist. It began life as a weekend experiment. Müller and his co-founder Gregor Zunic (right) ended up designing and building a prototype of the Browser Use tool in just four days, and they immediately launched it publicly via the Hacker News website. It met with an immediate and enthusiastic response, and the two founders quickly set up a company and went through the Y Combinator accelerator to get where they are now. Browser Use was notably used by the Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, creator of the viral AI agent tool Manus, which helped to increase awareness further. Müller now believes Browser Use has the potential to become a "fundamental layer" for AI agents, helping them to interact with any website more gracefully. There's good reason to think that could happen, for Browser Use has already gained more than 50,000 stars on GitHub, which makes it one of the fastest-growing open-source software tools in the world, with more than 15,000 developers using and actively contributing to its development. The startup's five-person team has established a number of real-world use cases too, such as login automation, data extraction, quality assurance testing and customer relationship management integrations. Müller said the early success of Browser Use shows us that the way we interact with the web is changing. He believes that as AI agents become more capable, automated workflows will soon come to outnumber human interactions online. And with Browser Use, he will play a big role in making that transition possible.

Browser Use, an Open Source Alternative to OpenAI Operator, Raises $17 Million

Browser Use, a tool that helps AI agents connect with the browser, recently announced that it has raised $17 million. The funding round was led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from A Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, Liquid 2, SV Angel, Pioneer Fund, and others. To address the announcement, Gregor Žunič, co-founder of Browser Use, said on X, "A few months ago, Browser Use was just a...weekend experiment to see if LLMs could navigate the web like humans. In just four days, we built an initial prototype and launched it on Hacker News. Build stuff, move fast, break things." The company was founded by Magnus Müller and Žunič earlier this year. Browser Use was part of Y Combinator's 2025 winter batch, as reported by Tech Crunch. It was launched right after OpenAI launched the Operator. The announcement highlighted that Browser Use is building an infrastructure that enables AI to interact with the web as seamlessly as humans do. It explained that most automation solutions rely on vision-based approaches, attempting to see the web like a human. The funding will further accelerate the vision. Browser Use added that the existing methods are slow, expensive, and unreliable. The company claims to have a different approach, which is to convert website interfaces into structured text that LLMs can process deterministically. Browser Use mentioned that its approach is faster, more efficient, and offers more precise interaction with UI elements like buttons, dropdowns, and input fields. It also added that it offers a more reliable system that avoids the errors of pixel-based navigation. With AI advancements, companies have increasingly been taking the open source approach while building something. Recently, Docker's founder seemingly built an open source alternative to Claude Code.