The startup Browser Use, specialized in agentic artificial intelligence (AI), has secured funding of 17 million dollars, led by Felicis Ventures.
The company transforms the elements of websites into a format readable by AI, allowing agents to make decisions autonomously.
AI news: the important funding for Browser Use
The startup Browser Use, founded in 2024 by Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic at the ETH Zurich’s Student Project House accelerator, has recently completed a funding round of 17 million dollars.
The operation was led by Felicis Ventures and saw the participation of prominent investors such as A Capital, Liquid2, Nexus Ventures, Paul Graham, Pioneer Fund, SV Angel, and Y Combinator.
The company’s goal is to simplify the interaction between artificial intelligence models and the web, transforming website interfaces into a structured and readable format by LLMs (Large Language Models).
Browser Use stands out for an innovative approach to the automation of online interactions.
Traditionally, artificial intelligence models use vision-based systems to navigate websites, relying on screenshots and image recognition to understand graphical interfaces.
This method, however, can prove to be unreliable, leading to frequent interruptions in the process.
The solution proposed by Browser Use converts the elements of web pages into structured text, allowing AI agents to interact with the sites more precisely and efficiently.
With this technology, agents are able to make autonomous decisions, perform repetitive actions, and manage tasks without the need for human intervention.
According to Müller, this methodology offers significant advantages over traditional approaches:
“Many vision-based agents rely on screenshots to navigate within sites, but often encounter operational issues. Our system translates the pages into a format understandable for AI, allowing the execution of the same tasks with greater reliability and at lower costs.”
AI automation and the future of web navigation
One of the main objectives of Browser Use is to make the web accessible to AI agents in the same way it is for humans.
In the current digital landscape, interacting with websites requires manual actions, such as clicking buttons, filling out forms, and navigating between pages.
The company emphasizes that with the spread of LLMs and autonomous agents, this paradigm is changing.
Browser Use is developing an infrastructure that allows artificial intelligence to operate online smoothly, eliminating the barriers between unstructured data and AI systems.
According to Myers, this technology represents a new frontier for the complete automation of human activities:
“AI agents for the web act as a bridge between models trained statically on texts and the constantly evolving digital landscape.”
Thanks to this innovation, AI agents will be able to autonomously perform a wider range of online operations, improving sectors such as business automation, customer service, and data management.
The success of the startup is evidenced by the wide participation of the developer community. The project has surpassed 50,000 stars on GitHub and has over 15,000 active developers contributing to its development.
Open-source represents a central element of Browser Use’s strategy. In just five weeks, Müller and Zunic developed a demo, making it available for the developer community.
This allowed for the rapid testing and refinement of the system’s functionalities, accelerating its adoption.
Advantages over traditional systems
The method proposed by the startup offers several advantages compared to solutions based on visual analysis of web pages:
- – Greater execution speed: by avoiding the processing of images and screenshots, operations are completed more quickly.
- – High precision: text-based conversion reduces error margins compared to pixel-based navigation.
- – Lower cost: the system is more efficient from a computational standpoint, reducing operational expenses.
- – Greater reliability: web interfaces change frequently, and the traditional image-based approach can be ineffective when layouts are modified. The Browser Use solution, on the other hand, is more flexible and adaptable.
Thanks to these characteristics, the system can automate repetitive operations such as form filling, data extraction, and navigation between complex pages, helping to optimize the work of companies and organizations that operate online.
With the funding of 17 million dollars, Browser Use now has the necessary resources to expand its technology and establish itself as a leader in the field of agentic AI for the web.
The company aims to simplify and optimize the interaction between artificial intelligence and websites, improving the efficiency of digital work.
The idea of transforming the web into a source of structured data that is easily interpretable by AI opens new perspectives for the development of autonomous agents capable of operating without human intervention.
The broad support from the developer community and the strong interest from investors suggest that this technology could have a significant impact in the near future.
The interaction between artificial intelligence and the web is rapidly evolving, and Browser Use could represent a crucial step towards the complete automation of digital activities.
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