Browser Use made websites readable to AI agents, went viral, and raised a $17M seed

Two ETH Zurich students open-sourced a layer turning websites into text AI agents can act on; Manus drove downloads to 28k/day; Felicis led a $17M seed.

Browser Use

它在赌什么That AI agents would do real work inside browsers, and that an open-source layer making any website readable and operable by agents would become that wave's foundation.在扩

做的是什么生意

Open-source developer tool that converts a website's buttons and elements into a text-like format so AI agents can browse, click, and fill forms like a human.

启动资金：$17M seed led by Felicis, with Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners (March 2025).

起因

Founded in 2024 by Magnus Müller and Gregor Žunič, two data-science master's students at ETH Zurich, out of the university's Student Project House accelerator. Müller had spent years on web-scraping tools; the pair reasoned that combining scraping with data science could prompt a browser to perform a task. A working demo took five weeks, took off, and was open-sourced.

经过

Browser Use turns a page's buttons and elements into a text-like format agents can act on, avoiding the screenshot navigation that breaks on dynamic sites like LinkedIn. Usage spread through YC's Winter 2025 batch — more than 20 companies in it used the tool — and exploded when Chinese startup Butterfly Effect ran its viral Manus agent on it: daily downloads quintupled to 28,000. Days after OpenAI launched Operator, the founders shipped a hosted cloud product; in March 2025 Felicis led a $17M seed with Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.

报道10 startups to watch from YC W25 Demo Day

结果

Still active and scaling. The seed closed in March 2025, the open-source repo had passed 25,000 GitHub stars within three months of launch, and the company was selling Browser Use Cloud alongside the free MIT-licensed library.

新闻TechCrunch: Browser Use raises $17M

背景

Browser Use began as a student experiment in turning the web into something an AI can operate. Magnus Müller, who had built web-scraping tools for years, and Gregor Žunič, a fellow data-science master's student at ETH Zurich, prototyped it in five weeks through the university's Student Project House. They open-sourced the result, and the tool spread through developers faster than any go-to-market plan could have.

The bet was that AI agents would do real work in browsers and that the missing piece was an interface layer: a way to convert any website's buttons and elements into a text-and-action format agents can act on reliably, instead of screenshots that break when sites change. The YC Winter 2025 batch proved the point — more than 20 companies in the batch ran on it.

The Manus moment made it famous: the viral Chinese agent used Browser Use to browse, and daily downloads quintupled to 28,000. Days after OpenAI launched Operator, the team shipped a hosted cloud version; Felicis then led a $17M seed with Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. As of March 2025 it was scaling as the open-source default for browser agents.

这件事要成立，得有什么

Dynamic sites break screenshot-based agents; a text-and-action layer is cheaper and more reliable, so the tool solved a felt, recurring problem.
Open-source-first gave distribution before investors arrived — Felicis explicitly cited it as what sealed the deal.
Being inside YC W25 made the product the default inside the most concentrated buyer pool for agent tooling.
Hosted cloud (proxy rotation, persistent sessions, parallelism) turned an MIT-licensed library into a business.

更多关于这家公司

官网Browser Use on YC 官网GitHub repo

可借鉴之处

Open-sourcing the infrastructure layer let a five-week student demo ride a wave it didn't create; when agents went viral, it was already the default.

后续进展

As of late March 2025, Browser Use was post-seed and hiring in San Francisco. It ran two products: the free MIT-licensed open-source library and Browser Use Cloud, a $30/month hosted tier aimed at production automation. The founders framed the company's mission as becoming the fundamental layer that lets any LLM operate a browser — tell your computer what to do, and it gets it done.

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