We may not have an agreed definition of “agent”, but a multitude of new companies want to create “agents” tools to automate several online tasks. One of those firms, Use of the browserIt has attracted a ton of interest of developers and investors thanks to its solution that makes websites more “legible” for ai agents.
The use of the browser told TechCrunch that he has collected a considerable initial financing round of $ 17 million directed by Astasia Myers de Felicis with the participation of Paul Graham, a capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. The company's financing has not been previously informed.
The use of the browser, part of the 2025 winter lot of Y Combinator, has gained notoriety in recent months. The use of the use of Butterfly Effect of Butterfly in its Viral Manus tool promoted the awareness of the new heights.
Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic founded the use of the browser last year through the accelerator of the House of the eth Zurich Student Project. Müller had been working on web scraping tools for years, and met with Zunic in 2024 while the couple obtained their teachers in data science. Together, according to Müller, they came up with the idea of combining the web scraping with data science to boost a browser that performs a task.
Müller and Zunic built a demonstration of use of the browser in five weeks, and took off. Subsequently, they obtained it.
The browser essentially uses the buttons and elements of a website in a “more digestible text” format for the agents. This helps agents understand the different options and make decisions autonomously.
“Many agents trust vision -based systems and tried and sailed on websites through screenshots, and the process (El) process, things break,” Müller said. “We convert (websites) into something that agents can understand. This approach means that we can execute the same tasks over and over again at a cheaper cost.”
There is an increasing number of ai companies that want to make their agents interact with the websites with more grace, and Müller believes that the use of the browser can become a “fundamental layer” that satisfies this need. He added that more than 20 companies in the current one and Combinator Winter Batch used the use of the browser for their own requirements.
“There are companies that come to us and say: 'What can we do to make it easier for agents to navigate our website?'” Müller said. “There are sites, for example, LinkedIn, which change the way the website works all the time, so agents often fail in sites like those.”
According to Myers, Felicis has been actively looking at the space of ai agents in recent years, and the use of the browser was felt as the right opportunity to increase the company's portfolio there. She said that the company's founding team, and her open origin approach, sealed the treatment
“We believe that web agents are the next border that really helps with the automation of human to extreme tasks,” Myers told Techcrunch. “(W) EB ai agents are this dynamic bridge between previously trained static models that focus mostly on the constantly changing digital panorama.”
(Tagstotranslate) Browsers (T) Paul Graham (T) and Combinator (T) ai Agent (T) Manus