Browserbase raises preemptive Series B led by Notable Capital, launches Director AI for web automation

was pumped. That's right. Anyway, I will let you take the intro with Paul, get the details from him on what's going on in his world, in the browser based world. There he is, Mr. Paul Klein IVth. Welcome. Hey guys. Big uh big day for you. Break it down. What's going on? Good. Uh you know, series B announcement today.

Of course, you know, Sequin has his touchdown chain. I brought the browserbased chain in to the big You got the big B. All right. Well, I'm gonna hit the gong for the big B if if the team can go to the wide. Get ready here. There we go. Solid connection for you and the browserbased team. Um, love to see it.

Love to see it. So, the chain, what how do you have any sort of like milestones? The chain stays on until 100 million of of ARR, you know, the chain is currently taped on. Uh, it falls off. It's from Amazon. So, I I think that the series D will upgrade to a better chain. Real. Okay. Okay.

So, a couple couple rounds away. Um, awesome. Who who participated in the round? Um, I'm I'm sure you had a pretty fun process. Uh, but but break it down for us. Yeah, you know, we're super lucky at Browser Base. Every round that we've done has been preemptive.

So, it it was a quick one and that's because we work with people we've known for a long time. you know, Glenn Solomon from Notable Capital. He's someone who met with us in the earliest days and uh the Notable team, formerly known GGV Capital, they're just killing it right now.

They just did features and labels series B as well. And I think that really started the conversation for us. We're like, "Hey, sounds like you guys are doing B's. We'd love to kind of have a conversation. " Of course, CRV doubling down as well. Re rechristian on our board.

Uh, you know, Pler Perkins as well, one of our earliest investors at the seed, participation. I feel like this board is a good starting lineup and, uh, we can go pretty far with it. So, we're excited. Amazing. You guys also had a big launch today. Is that right? Um, director, what's going on there?

Our whole thing is that you know when we think about how people automate the web and browser base for those who aren't familiar we're basically a web browser that can be controlled by your AI really an infrastructure company so we sell to developers who are building features that want to go automate the web and we realized that one of the places that people are starting when they're building their applications is often in these kind of lovable vzero or bolt experiences they're vibe coding and we kind of looked at the way vibe coding applications were set up to help developers who build like you know automation scripts like submitting your Delaware franchise tax or grabbing a quote from a website of a supplier you want to work with.

And for us, we wanted to build something built for the vibe coders who actually want to build software that will do work on their behalf. And that's what director is. Director.

ai allows you to go to the website, prompt, and it's going to output this repeatable script that will go to a website, click buttons, fill in forms, download files all on your behalf. We have a few cool prompts on there as demos. One is like going to Kshi and checking the poll for uh will Trump unfollow Elon on Twitter.

Another one's like hey go to the NASDAQ website and find me all the earnings calls for this week. And then it outputs not only it does it just does that for you and then also outputs code so you can integrate that into your application and run that every single week in a repeatable way. Very cool.

George Hotz was actually surprisingly bullish on computer use. He's he he usually pours a lot of cold water on a bunch of different stuff, but he was pretty pretty optimistic about uh me being able to book a flight on delta. com with an agent coming soon.

Uh what I didn't get from him and what I want to get from you is where does that interaction live? He was saying that yes, it's coming. You'll be able to just say I'm trying to fly to New York tomorrow.

Book me a flight that gets me there in the evening and it will do it for you and it'll interact with the web page or the API. The question is where does that interaction live? Is that in a consumer app that I uh subscribe to or pay for is ad supported or is that a delta.

com feature or back and forth like where does the where where does more of the agentic interaction live? Yeah, I think for for consumer use cases like booking a flight, it has to live where the distribution is, right? And that's probably going to be Google, Apple um on device.

your AI will control the browser on your device.

But if you think of companies like RAMP, uh if Ramp wants to go automate collecting an invoice from a website where they don't have a first-party connection, the way they can agentically do that is with a web browser, going to that website, you know, getting your invoice for you and putting it through their, you know, bill pay.

I'm a ramp customer, so you know, it's something I've been asking for for as a feature for a while.

So I think that like you know for consumer automation use cases it certainly will live on device or in some sort of consumer app maybe chatbt but for the B2B use cases where you're actually using some software and the automation is an extension of the existing software that's where I think the the browser and more generalistic computer use that lives within a company like browser base it's really going to stand out.

Yeah, le let's dig into that that ramp example uh more because I' i've had to do this where I've wanted to classify like an Uber receipt. For some reason, I wasn't subscribed to the emails and so I go into the Uber website and I pull the receipt down and then I upload that to ramp, right?

Um with browserbased, they could potentially do that if they have my login.

um long term there's probably some sort of API interaction and so I almost feel like there's this weird world where like you see a lot of people using computer use and then once something really takes off then they then they automate with an integration but then there's like a new wave so is your growth kind of like a series of scurves is that the way to think about it or do you think that people will just be so happy with the results from computer use that they will just say why would I even bother building the direct API connection well I think There will always be direct API connections and there should be.

You know, if someone has appetite to build that I I highly encourage it, but I think about like the rest of the internet, the internet that already exists. Are we going to rebuild that internet?

The analogy I like to use and I use in this piece today with Alex Conrad is that, you know, when we think about Whimo, you know, Whimo drives on the roads we've already built. And Whimo is not good enough to navigate those roads.

It might be more efficient for us to build highways just for Whimo or just for your self-driving cars to go go out and browse, but in in the end like if AI can use the internet the same way we can just as well as we can, why not just let it browse the web like we do?

Short highspeed rail I'm hearing because when you think dedicated roads for something that's autonomous that doesn't need to steer, that's a high-speed rail. But yeah, uh why not just be in a in a self-driving car? How much are you thinking about bigger partnerships long term?

There will be some, you know, uh, companies that will not be excited about, you know, computer use agents kind of, you know, interacting with their web properties and and at some point you might be, you know, constantly going back and forth with them, you know, trying to figure out a way to I I don't know exactly what it would look like, get get around captures and and things of that nature, but is that something that over time, I mean, we've had Zach from Plaid on the show uh many times and, you know, early on they they um, you know, were sort of doing things maybe manually and then and then um you know with software but then they ended up developing out you know meaningful partnerships to enable these sort of interactions to be more seamless.

Is that something on your road map at all? I can imagine just after you guys have raised you know over $50 million in a very short period of time. I imagine people are kind of knocking on your door now at this point to have conversations as well.

Yeah, we're certainly excited to partner with the antibbot detection companies. In our mind, like browser has an opportunity to be an arbiter of good bots. You know, for example, we may be able to help a customer of ours say, "Hey, we're this small startup. Here's our use case. We've done KYC with browserbased.

We have, you know, restricted domains that we can only browse to. " And we could help kind of represent them to the broader, you know, antibbot community and say, "This is a customer that we've certified. " And I think in the for the longest time, antibiot was built because there's only bad bots online.

But now there's good and bad bots. And on browse, we hope that we can empower, show, and and prove that these are good bots and use the brand that we built as a center part of our trust. But regardless, like, you know, Plaid is an amazing company. I've really looked up to Plaid.

It is possible to build integrations for every single bank out there. There's there is like a finite number of banks or at least like a workable or tractable number of banks. U there is billions of websites out there.

So regardless, you still are going to have to have some AI for when an agent or a customer prompts your agent, hey, can you work with this specific website? Uh, you might not have an integration built. And browser base is kind of that primitive that you know the integration of last resort.

And we hope that if you're building an agent, you include a browser tool more for like the what if it happens, not if for the when it happens. How do you think about competition coming from the hyperscalers and the big cloud platforms?

uh companies like Stripe and Plaid haven't seen much competition from GCP, Azure, AWS, but on the flip side, some of the other parts of the AI stack have been either cloned or offered or vended in through some of the bigger cloud platforms.

Is that a risk or or do you have an idea for uh a moat that is is too high for for the king of moes, Jeff Bezos, to clear? Well, I think it starts with a few things.

One, I think you have to build a great developer product and that comes down to actually having a dashboard of features that people love to use and work really well. Um, yeah, Jeff Bezos is the king, but I don't think any developer really raves about the AWS console, right?

And secondly, you have to have more than just infrastructure. Infrastructure always kind of becomes a commodity, right? Sure. So, moving up the stack one layer, that's what we did with Stage hand. Stage hand is our browser automation framework.

When you build it, you kind of write code and it generates the the integration. Sorry. When you write stage hand code, it actually generates the browser automation functionality in browser base. So it's like one layer up. The analogy here is like burcell and x. js y browser base and stage hand.

So when you own the framework, you're really able to offer more stickiness and just build more firstparty integrations into the framework that run better on browserbased. And then finally, director is at top of that stack, right?

Well, if you have a framework, you probably want to have a way to generate that framework code. So we moved one layer higher to the application level. And I haven't seen any incumbents really do well at adding, you know, building developer love around new frameworks.

Um, and then when they hire like building applications to generate them yet. So for me, I'm kind of betting on innovation here. I'm betting on us expanding our portfolio. And there's this Parker Conrad tweet which was like, hey, this is going to be one on the field. Who can build it better? Who can sell it?

Who can market more? Who can innovate more? And uh, we're ready to go battle on the field with our new fundra in the field, in the bathrooms, in the slack. It's fought out everywhere. Uh, we love it. Um, talk to me about the good bots versus bad bots dynamic uh trends in the robots. txt.

Is there a need for some sort of like I don't know like almost universal uh like trust rating or something that identifies you as a good bot as you go around because there's going to be lots of anti-bot protections and yet I imagine that having some sort of like tr coming from a trusted IP address is something that gets you out of a lot of Cloudflare captas.

Um, and and I imagine that that there's probably work that you can do almost on like the business development side to to kind of grease the wheels as you try and automate more and more of the web. Is that something that you're thinking about?

What what are the different approaches that you can take to make sure that as the anti-bot protections get more and more robust, you don't get bogged down in that and you're still offering a good experience to developers? Yeah, it's a great question.

All um one of our investors Jeff Lawson he he always frames great infrastruure companies as kind of being one of three things. Yeah. One is like APIs representing capital. So it's like hey if I want to deploy a thousand servers I don't have the capital to stand that up. AWS I can just deploy a thousand servers.

The second one is algorithmic complexity. So you know your inference as a service right you have a bunch of inference you know how can you run that more efficiently than anyone else. How can you serve it in a innovative way?

And then the third one is really bisdev as an API and I think browserbased long-term partnerships are extremely important to us and that's why we're really proud to work with companies like work OS clerk stitch and octa which all have major capture presences on the w online because that's what protects authentication.

Secondly, I think the credentiing actually happens when you log in. Like that's how you show you are who you are. And I think solving agent off, which I think these authentication companies I just mentioned will solve, really allows our customers to say, "Hey, I'm Paul.

I'm logging into my United account and this is my agent, but it's acting on behalf of me because I've authenticated it. " I think that's pretty compelling. You know, a lot of the reason Antib exists is to prevent, you know, account takeovers or spam.

But if it can authenticate and say, "Hey, I'm acting on behalf of Paul. " I really think that's a good way to show proof of ownership or proof of humanood of a bot and that's going to be solved very soon.

It feels like there's a bunch of stuff happening at Agentic O that is very very promising and that's going to be great for browser base and we're happy to partner with all those companies to make it happen. That's fantastic. Well, congrats on the big round uh and thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

Always welcome. Congratulations to you and the team. Excited to watch you guys work. Have a good rest of the day. Talk to you soon. See you around. Appreciate it. And really quickly, let me tell you about adquick. com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adqu combines technology, out ofome expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Alex Canerwitz from big technology. We love big technology and we got the big technology in the studio. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for joining us. How are you doing? Thanks guys. I'm doing great. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on. uh would you mind uh doing