Switchboard's $38M cloud-coworking bet ended in a pivot to Airtop's AI browser agents

Airtop runs cloud browsers that AI agents control with natural-language commands: developers call Extract and Act APIs to log in, gather structured data and complete multi-step web tasks without CSS-selector hacks or Puppeteer scripts.

That AI agents need dependable cloud browsers — plain-English login, navigation and extraction — and that this beats selling coworking rooms.

~$38.4M total: $13.8M seed and a $25M Series A (July 2022) led by Icon Ventures at ~$200M post-money; backers included Sequoia, Spark Capital, HubSpot Ventures and Cisco Investments.

Switchboard began in 2020 after founder Amir Ashkenazi — who previously built and sold Shopping.com and Adap.tv — could not share sheet music with his guitar teacher inside a video call. The company built persistent virtual rooms where live, multiplayer web apps (Docs, Figma, Jira, Miro) sat side by side with video, so remote work felt like sharing a table rather than watching a screen-share.

Switchboard raised a $13.8M seed and then a $25M Series A in July 2022 led by Icon Ventures at roughly $200M post-money, and held five patents on side-by-side collaboration. But by late 2024 Ashkenazi judged the opportunity ahead of the company to be AI web agents: he wound the coworking product down and pivoted to Airtop, a browser-automation platform where agents log in, browse, extract data and complete web tasks from plain-language instructions. Airtop's browser API for AI agents shipped by November 2024 (Cisco Investments portfolio snapshot and LangChain case study), and its Agent Builder product ranked #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt on September 4, 2026.

Still live as Airtop: the company runs cloud browsers for AI agents and its Agent Builder launch drew 328 upvotes for #2 on Product Hunt's September 4, 2026 daily board; the original Switchboard product is gone and switchboard.app now redirects to airtop.ai.

Remote work went hybrid, yet meetings stayed screen-shares; persistent multi-app rooms were a better answer that still demanded a hard habit change from teams.

The company had built genuinely hard infrastructure — live multiplayer third-party apps in a shared canvas, five patents — which became the foundation for controlling real browsers at scale.

Agentic AI created a concrete, painful gap: agents can reason, but they cannot reliably log in, navigate, extract or act on the messy, authenticated web.

Serial-founder discipline mattered: Ashkenazi had pivoted every company he founded, so winding down a well-funded product was a decision the team could actually make.

Validation followed quickly: Cisco Investments featured the API in late 2024, LangChain documented the architecture, and Product Hunt gave Agent Builder a #2 launch in September 2026.

Technical brilliance in a niche category can still be the wrong bet — the harder call is redirecting funded momentum when the bigger market, agents needing dependable browsers, appears.

As of September 4, 2026 Airtop is live and building: its Agent Builder launch took #2 on Product Hunt's daily board with 328 upvotes, following the 2024 debut of its natural-language browser API for AI agents and a LangChain customer case study. The Switchboard coworking product is wound down and switchboard.app redirects to airtop.ai. Roughly $38.4M was raised across both identities, including a $25M Series A at about $200M post-money led by Icon Ventures in July 2022; no later funding, revenue figures or an exit have been publicly reported.