We may not yet have an agreed definition of AI “agent”, but a multitude of startups want to create ‘agent’ tools to automate different tasks online. One such firm, Browser usehas attracted a great deal of interest in developers and investors thanks to the solution that websites make more “readable” to AI agents.

The use of the browser told TechCrunch that it resulted in a significant $ 17 million seed financing round, led by Felicis’ Astasia Myers with participation from Paul Graham, a capital and Nexus Venture Partners. The company’s funding has not been reported before.

The use of the browser, part of Y Combinator’s 2025 Winter Batch, has gained notoriety over the past few months. Chinese boot butterfly effect of the use of hatchery in the viral manusal instrument brought awareness to new heights.

Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic founded the use of the browser last year by Eth Zurich’s student project house accelerator. Müller has been working on web-scraping instruments for years and met Zunic in 2024 while the couple obtained their master’s degrees in data science. According to Müller, they came up with the idea of ​​combining web scraping with data science to ask a browser to perform a task.

Müller and Zunic built a browser use demo over five weeks – and it has risen. Then they opened it.

The browser essentially uses the buttons and elements of a website in a more digestible, ‘text -like’ format for agents. It helps the agents to understand the different options and to make autonomous decisions.

“Many agents rely on vision systems and try websites through screenshots, and in (the) process breaks things,” Müller said. ‘We convert (websites) into something that agents can understand. This approach means that we can perform the same tasks again and again at a cheaper cost. ‘

There are an increasing number of AI businesses that want their agents to work more gracefully with websites, and Müller believes that the use of browser can become a ‘fundamental layer’ that serves for this need. He added that more than 20 companies in the current Y Combinator Winter Batch used the use of browser for their own requirements.

‘There are businesses to us and say,’ What can we do to make it easier for agents to navigate on our website? “” Müller said. “There are sites – for example LinkedIn – that change the way the site works all the time, so agents often fail on sites like this.”

According to Myers, Felicis has actively looked at the AI ​​agent space over the past few years, and the use of the browser feels like the right opportunity to grow the firm’s portfolio there. She said that the founder team of the company and the first-source first approach sealed the agreement

“We think web AI agents are the next boundary that really helps with the end-to-end automation of human tasks,” Myers told TechCrunch. “(W) EB AI drugs are this dynamic bridge between static pre-trained models that are mostly text-oriented in the ever-changing digital landscape.”