Browserbase reels in $40M for its browser automation tools

Browserbase Inc., a startup focused on automating tasks that involve interacting with webpages, has closed a $40 million funding round.

Notable Capital led the Series B investment. Browserbase disclosed in its announcement of the raise today that Kleiner Perkins and CRV participated as well. It’s now reportedly valued at $300 million, four times what it was worth in September.

Testing a new website for bugs manually can be prohibitively time-consuming. As a result, software teams automate the task by writing scripts that interact with website features to reveal bugs. There are also other situations where developers automate website interactions. A software company, for example, might create a script that automatically detects when new software contracts are posted to a government agency’s website.

Browserbase provides a so-called headless browser specifically designed to automate webpage interactions. According to the company, it’s optimized for use by scripts and artificial intelligence agents. The browser is available through a serverless platform that removes the need for customers to manage the underlying infrastructure.

According to Browserbase, its platform can spin up thousands of browsers in a fraction of a second. Each instance is assigned four virtual central processing units to ensure that web page interactions are completed quickly. To further boost performance, the platform hosts browsers in data centers around the world. Developers can send requests to a web server from the nearest data center to reduce latency.

The platform is compatible with Puppeteer and Selenium, two popular open-source tools for creating browser automation scripts. As a result, developers don’t have to change their existing scripts to use the software. There’s also support for Browserbase’s own Stagehand automation tool, which it touts as a more capable alternative to Puppeteer and Selenium.

Traditional browser automation scripts often malfunction when the webpage with which they’re designed to interact changes. To mitigate that issue, developers sometimes swap their scripts for AI agents, which comes with a tradeoff. An AI agent can adapt to changes in the webpage that it accesses but may sometimes hallucinate, which creates reliability issues.

Stagehand is aimed at addressing those challenges. According to the company, it does so by allowing developers to combine traditional scripts with AI agents in the same workflow. Agents are used when adaptability is needed while scripts automate tasks that require a high degree of reliability.

Browserbase expanded its portfolio with a third product, Director, against the backdrop of today’s funding announcement. Director allows business users to automate webpage interactions using natural language prompts. A worker could, for example, ask the tool to place an order on an e-commerce website or check the status of a package.

“This vision where AI handles the boring parts while humans focus on what matters, represents a massive business opportunity,” founder and Chief Executive Officer Paul Klein wrote in a blog post. “If Browserbase can become the rails of this new era, we’ll be enabling an entirely new category of applications.”

Browserbase will use the new capital to hire more people.

Image: Browserbase

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