Switchboard的3800万美元云协作豪赌，最终转向Airtop的AI浏览器代理

做的是什么生意

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.

启动资金：~$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.

起因

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.

经过

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.

结果

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.

可借鉴之处

细分领域的技术精湛仍可能是错误押注——更困难的是，当更大的市场（需要可靠浏览器的代理）出现时，如何调整已获融资的势头。