Browserbase Raises $40M To Help AI Agents Work With Websites
The 16-month-old infrastructure startup behind 'headless browsers' is now valued at $300 million and claims more than 1,000 customers. Now it's launching a tool for non-developers, called Director.
The Upshot
City streets would look different, perhaps radically so, if self-driving carmakers could redesign them from scratch. But since human drivers aren’t leaving the road anytime soon, they learn the paths available to them instead, with Waymo spending months, even years, mapping each one.
The internet in the age of AI is in a similar “messy middle” state, to hear Browserbase founder Paul Klein IV tell it.
“It can be a little contrarian to say, but we’re not going to rewrite the whole internet for AI,” Klein tells Upstarts. “AI is going to get so smart that it’s able to use the internet for you.”
Browserbase, the startup he launched earlier last year, hopes to help bridge that gap between human use and the AI bots. Klein operates in a wonkily-named area – the “headless browser” – but what his tool does is straightforward: spin up web browsers use by other software, not humans, meaning they lack the interface you might be using to read this article right now.
Why create a ghost browser? They still work with more human-friendly websites, able to authenticate users, click buttons and download data, only faster and at a large scale per project (think the equivalent of thousands of people, over even more hours). That data can then be pulled in consistent, automated fashion, to serve as the underpinning for other internal and customer-facing apps.
If you’re not a developer, you may not have heard of headless browsers yet. But at least 1,000 companies currently use Browserbase, including AI standouts like Commure, 11x, Perplexity and Vercel. More than 20,000 developer signups, meanwhile, have already run 50 million browser sessions on Browserbase this year, already twice the 25 million it reached in 2024.
And despite only launching 16 months ago, Browserbase’s team of 30 has already reached more than $3 million in revenue, which – unlike with some prosumer AI tools whose initial growth is tough to evaluate – already comes mostly from teams expanding their use of Browserbase’s tools. (The company charges on a consumption basis.)
Now, Browserbase is hoping to get on your radar by expanding into non-developers, too. The company has launched Director, a new product that can set up such automations and generate the code itself. And to expand its footprint, Browserbase is also announcing that it has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Notable Capital. The funding, which includes previous investors Kleiner Perkins and CRV, values Browserbase at $300 million, nearly 4x its Series A raised in September.
A fast-growing startup with a large developer community using its tools (Browserbase also support open-source versions), Browserbase and Klein are hoping to build the website data automator for the ‘vibe coding’ era.
For the wider startup ecosystem, their initial momentum is informative. For a wider audience interested in how AI will change how we interact with and build the internet, it has eyebrow-raising implications.
“If anyone can vibe code, anyone can now think of how to get computers to work on their behalf,” Klein tells Upstarts exclusively. More on that vision – and how customers are using Browserbase today – below.
Presented by Notion.
From idea to IPO, Notion grows with your team. Move faster with structure for your docs, projects, and workflows — while Notion AI captures meeting notes, summarizes docs, and lets you search across your workspace and connected tools. 94% of the Forbes AI 50 companies use Notion to build faster, every day.
Headless Horseman
Klein credits his interest in building infrastructure ‘picks and shovels’ to Twilio, where he first worked as an engineering intern in 2016. At the first All Hands meeting he attended, CEO Jeff Lawson announced the company was going public.
Klein eventually spent three years at Twilio until May 2020 in technical roles before leaving to co-found Stream Club, a startup offering live-streaming software tools for the Covid-19 lockdown era, and which was acquired by fellow startup Mux at the end of 2021. In two years at Mux, Klein worked with headless browsers to enable users to stream broadcasts more widely across the web.
As ChatGPT took off, peers would reach out to Klein asking how to use similar browsers – faster and cheaper to run because they lacked graphical user interfaces, or GUIs (think the search bar, buttons and other readable parts of a site that you, as a human, usually want).
Such browsers were already somewhat commonly used by developers to test website pages – automating, say, the clicking of buttons to see if code changes worked – but to empower AI tools, they’d need to be more resilient, able to adapt if a “sign-in” button changed to “log-in,” or other changes popped up on a given site.
“After the 50th conversation, it became clear that there could be a product here,” he says.
Companies were also already using scripts and bots to ‘scrape’ the web, pulling all the data and info they could off websites to use in their own apps or knowledge bases. Broadly speaking, web scraping is a controversial, debatable tactic – to some it’s a dark art, if not simply stealing another business’s intellectual property.
In launching Browserbase, Klein says he followed a principle that if he was allowed access to an application or site’s data, so should his AI agent. “We’re not really a scraping company,” he says now. “We focus more on automation.”
One of the first potential customers to meet Klein and co. was Brandon Max, co-founder and CTO of Pursuit, a startup looking to make it easier to sell into the public sector as a software buyer. When Klein met with the Pursuit team before launching Browserbase, Pursuit had just spent the time and trouble to set up its own compute clusters to scrape data from public sector websites for indicators of what contracts might be up soon, and who had budget.
“It really sucks to scrape and run this ourselves,” Max says he told Klein. After a few months, Pursuit switched over to Browserbase, which it uses to now scan more than 130,000 websites representing cities, counties, universities, fire districts and more. Pursuit then combines that info with mass-submitted FOIA requests of purchase orders to generate confidence scores for salespeople to know who best to contact, and how.
“This data is required by law to be public,” Max adds. “And we think it’s better for our kids to grow up in a place where the government gets better services for cheaper.”
With Director, Browserbase wants non-technical employees at companies, and ideally not just other startups, to set up similar (or at least lighter-weight) automations of their own. Klein compares Director to v0, the app-builder from Vercel. (Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch is an angel investor in Browserbase, as are Lawson, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Box CEO Aaron Levie.)
In a demo, Klein shows how a user could use a natural language query to open a browser and direct it to take repetitive actions, like checking the inventory and shipping times of ordering more parts. Director generates code on the back-end that can be called or pasted elsewhere to incorporate into apps.
One group who have shown interest in such tooling, he says: dental practices, where owners are looking to automate billing or pre-authorization of insurance. “Stepping out of our comfort zone to sell not just to developers, but anybody, is new for us and really fun,” Klein says.
More Than Scraping By
To reach 1,000 customers with a team of about 25 people is no small feat. But Browserbase must now build a sustainable business around its early momentum, while also staying ahead of questions around ethical use of its tech.
On the first count, Browserbase invests in open-source software to support its browser automation tool, Stagehand; one engineer contributes full-time to open-source code and the startup has sponsored the ScrapegraphAI project. Browserbase-backed tools are downloaded 1.3 million times per month on GitHub, Klein notes.
At Structify, which helps customers build their own custom datasets, co-founder Ronak Gandhi says his startup uses Browserbase to help pull together large-sized project sprints that can run up to a decade’s worth of browser hours in just a single day.
“We’re trying to fight for the pragmatic future.” — Paul Klein
A number of other startups are now looking to offer a version of headless browser; anyone could fork Browserbase’s open-sourced code, and its approach is not the only one. Others run browsers in developer-friendly virtual environments, running automations locally on their own servers.
Perplexity, which has worked with Browserbase, acquired web browser startup Comet earlier this year. A source with early access to the updated Comet product says they can use it automate actions like recurring orders from Amazon in a way that feels more like a personal assistant.
Right now, Browserbase doesn’t consider agent tools from the model providers like OpenAI or Perplexity directly competitive, but that could change. Given that Browserbase is easy to swap in and out and pay-as-you-go, customers could theoretically migrate fast.
So it has to win by being better and more hands-on. At Structify, Gandhi says that Browserbase has earned loyalty through its willingness to scale up temporary capacity whenever Structify has a big data push. In the past, Gandhi’s team has pinged Walker Griggs, Browserbase’s tech lead and a former colleague of Klein’s at Mux, on Slack to personally guide them through those moments, he says.
New lead investor Notable Capital sees Browserbase as carving out a loyal following similar to Vercel, another portfolio investment. “If you build a great service that provides for and anticipates the needs that developers have, it can be a very compelling value proposition,” says managing director Glenn Solomon.
Then there’s the elephant in the server: web scraping. Klein may say that Browserbase isn’t focused on such usage, but customers tell Upstarts that’s a big part of what they do. Everyone says they’re a good actor, but at Pursuit, Max says a wider debate about what fair use entails is looming.
“Scraping is definitely a controversial thing,” Max says, noting that Upstarts Media would probably not like all its articles to be scraped by a third party without attribution. (Note: indeed, we would not.)
The way these companies are using Browserbase, their searches cover a wide number of sites, meaning they’re not hugging any one website to failure with constant pings, customers say. Such work would otherwise be happening anyway, too, via offshore human teams, they add.
At Browserbase, Klein says his company currently vets every at-scale customer’s use case for his software to see if it meets its guidelines – a version of ‘Know Your Customer,’ or KYC, due diligence that might exceed its legal obligations. Browserbase has never received a complaint or takedown request, he claims.
“We’ve entered a new era where lots of non-humans going on the internet is actually good,” says Solomon, the investor.
Over time, as Browserbase’s software can make it easier to string together multiple agent processes for even more complex or long-running automations, Klein says he’d welcome a wider industry rethink on how companies charge for seat licenses. Maybe there will be one subscription and log-in for you, one for your AI agent.
“We’re trying to fight for the pragmatic future,” he says.
In the meantime, Browserbase has a business to build out. Its first salesperson started only yesterday, while Klein, who has led all sales personally to date, was pulling an all-nighter to ready for today’s product launch. With its fresh funding, Browserbase can hire more aggressively now to get ahead of the AI agent-led market that he’s convinced is about to break out.
Says Klein: “It’s going to be a really fun year.”