Why We Invested In Browserbase

“The future is software doing work on your behalf. But if it’s going to do work for you, it needs to do the same types of actions that you do. You’re browsing the web, interacting with websites, clicking buttons, downloading files, submitting code. And Browserbase is allowing software to control a web browser with code."

The rise of AI upended both what we thought software could do and what we thought was required to build software. AI agents are a new workload that require new software primitives. Browser infrastructure is one of those primitives. And in less than 18 months from founding, Browserbase has rebuilt the browser experience for AI. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Paul Klein IV and leading Browserbase’s Series B.

We first met Paul in late 2023, after he reached out in response to an article we published on the opportunity for serverless software. We shared similar views on what the next generation of infrastructure should look like – easy to start, easy to scale, opinionated platforms that abstract complexity from the developer. He wanted to bring the same design principles that we saw resonating at Notable portfolio companies such as Vercel*, Neon*, and Inngest*, to the sleepy headless browser market.

As Paul told us recently when we sat down for an interview, “I really grew to understand this problem first as the CTO of a venture-backed startup. My job was to build software—and by doing so, I had to understand this thing called a headless browser,” he said. “And instead of finding product-market fit, we spent a lot of time on headless browsers, and I became very opinionated about how this technology works. No one at the time was building the Stripe or Vercel-like experience for headless browsers,” Paul told us.

What we didn’t yet realize then was how important the browser would become to AI. If the ultimate goal of agents is to complete tasks autonomously, the critical integration they require is to the interface we use to complete tasks—the browser. Browser automation, however, remained a backwoods of software development. Scaling headless browsers is time consuming and expensive, requiring developers to stand up a variety of AWS services and constantly swap out proxies. Browser automation scripts were notoriously flakey, breaking whenever a website changed.

“The future is software doing work on your behalf. But if it’s going to do work for you, it needs to do the same types of actions that you do. You’re browsing the web, interacting with websites, clicking buttons, downloading files, submitting code. And Browserbase is allowing software to control a web browser with code. With the rise of AI, it makes it much easier to programmatically interact with the web and do it dynamically. So we think we're building this primitive for the future of software really focused on the automation of work,” Paul told us.

Browserbase is reinventing browser automation, opening up a world of possibilities for AI to interact with the broader web. Its headless browser cloud is the fastest and easiest way to spin up browsers for your AI to use. Stagehand, Browserbase’s browser automation SDK, makes automation scripts simple to write and declarative, solving the flakiness problem that’s long plagued incumbent scripting tools. Together, the platform is being used by companies like 11x, Vercel, and Perplexity. 

Today, Browserbase is also launching Director, a new product that lets anyone build browser automations in natural language. Director is a natural progression for the product, as Paul talked about in our interview: “When you start with infrastructure and frameworks, you tend to see the same lessons. There's analogies here to API companies. For us we started with Browserbase, the browser infrastructure. Then we launched Stagehand, the framework for controlling browsers. And now Director is a tool to allow anyone to generate web automation scripts using natural language,” he said. “We try and package up the essence of headless browsers into something that's easily digestible so that every engineer can integrate this functionality when needed into their product.”

With AI moving so quickly, it’s rare for us to meet a founder who can keep pace. It’s even rarer for us to meet someone who can stay ahead of the curve. Since founding Browserbase, Paul has done exactly that. As agents continue to grow, we believe Browserbase will become a critical component of AI infrastructure. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Paul and the Browserbase team on the journey.  

*Represents a Notable Capital portfolio company.