The archive · AI & Models · Strategic decision · 2020–2026
Switchboard's $38M cloud-coworking bet ended in a pivot to Airtop's AI browser agents
Amir Ashkenazi raised $38M for cloud-coworking rooms, wound them down in 2024, and reborn as Airtop — browsers AI agents drive in plain English.
Switchboard · Airtop
What the business is
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.
Starting capital：~$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.
How it started
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.
What happened
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.
How it ended up
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.
Background
Switchboard, founded in 2020 by six-time entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, grew out of a bad online guitar lesson: neither he nor his teacher could pull sheet music or tools into the same shared video space. His answer was a persistent cloud-coworking room where live, multiplayer web apps — Docs, Figma, Jira, Miro — sat side by side with video, so closing the laptop and returning the next morning left everything exactly where the team left it.
The product story attracted serious capital: a $13.8M seed and a $25M Series A in July 2022 led by Icon Ventures at roughly $200M post-money, with Sequoia, Spark Capital, HubSpot Ventures and Cisco Investments on the cap table, plus five patents on side-by-side collaboration. But by late 2024 Ashkenazi concluded that the opportunity ahead was larger in AI web agents than in coworking rooms, wound the product down, and pivoted the company into Airtop — a browser-automation platform where agents log in, browse, extract data and complete tasks from plain-language instructions.
The pivot moved fast: Airtop's browser API for AI agents was live by November 2024, earning a spot in Cisco Investments' portfolio snapshot and a LangChain customer case study that documented its Extract and Act APIs built on LangGraph subgraphs. Two years later, on September 4, 2026, Airtop's Agent Builder launch ranked #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt with 328 upvotes, while switchboard.app quietly redirected to airtop.ai.
What has to be true
- 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.
What can be applied
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.
Aftermath
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.
Sources
- Switchboard — the cloud coworking space that rethought the video call
- Startup Snapshot — Catching Up with our Portfolio Companies in November 2024
- How Airtop built web-automation for AI agents powered by the LangChain ecosystem
- Product Hunt 今日热榜 2026-09-04
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