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.”
