We may not have an agreed-upon definition of AI agent yet, but a multitude of startups want to create agentic tools to automate various tasks online. One such firm, Browser Use, has attracted a ton of interest from developers and investors thanks to its solution that makes websites more readable for AI agents.Browser Use told TechCrunch that it has raised a sizable $17 million seed funding round led by Felicis Astasia Myers with participation from Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. The companys funding hasnt previously been reported.Browser uses website.Browser Use, part of Y Combinators 2025 winter batch, has gained notoriety in recent months. Chinese startup Butterfly Effects use of Brower Use in its viral Manus tool drove awareness to new heights.Magnus Mller and Gregor Zunic founded Browser Use last year through ETH Zurichs Student Project House accelerator. Mller had been working on web-scraping tools for years, and met Zunic in 2024 while the pair were getting their masters degrees in data science. Together, according to Mller, they came up with the idea of combining web scraping with data science to prompt a browser to perform a task.Mller and Zunic built a Browser Use demo in five weeks and it took off. Subsequently, they open-sourced it. Browser Use essentially breaks down the buttons and elements of a website into a more digestible, text-like format for agents. This helps the agents understand the different options and make decisions autonomously.A lot of agents rely on vision-based systems and try and navigate websites through screenshots, and in [the] process, things break, Mller said. We convert [websites] into something agents can understand. This approach means we can run the same tasks again and again at a cheaper cost.Theres an increasing number of AI companies that want to make their agents interact with websites more gracefully, and Mller thinks Browser Use can become a fundamental layer serving this need. He added that more than 20 companies in the current Y Combinator Winter batch used Browser Use for their own requirements.There are companies coming to us and saying, What can we do to make it easier for agents to navigate our website? Mller said. There are sites for example, LinkedIn that change the way the website works all the time, so agents often fail on sites like those.According to Myers, Felicis has been actively looking at the AI agents space for the past several years, and Browser Use felt like the right opportunity to grow the firms portfolio there. She said that the companys founding team and its open-source-first approach sealed the dealWe think web AI agents are the next frontier that really helps with the end-to-end automation of human tasks, Myers told TechCrunch. [W]eb AI agents are this dynamic bridge between static pre-trained models that are mostly text-focused in the ever-changing digital landscape.