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. The tool 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 No. 1 source of fresh information too.

However, navigating the web is a tricky proposition for AI agents, for it involves tasks such as 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 can process in a deterministic way. That 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 enthusiastic response, and the two founders quickly set up a company and went through the Y Combinator accelerator to get where they are now.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said he’s not surprised by the rapid progress of Browser Use, because there’s an urgent need to make the web more accessible for AI agents given the demands for more sophisticated automation.

“Browser Use is doing for AI what companies like Google have done for people with disabilities, making websites more accessible,” he said. “With today’s funding, its tool is going to get a lot more publicity and a lot more use, and then we’ll see how well it works at scale. Don’t be surprised if browser makers look to get in on this and introduce their own, robot-ready functions to aid AI web exploration.”

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. 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.

Photo: Browser Use