He decided the web browser was built for the wrong job, then spent fifteen years rebuilding it for the people who work for a living.
// Mazy Dar. The engineer who counts the seconds you lose between tabs - and sells them back to you.
Four hours a week. That is what the average knowledge worker loses flipping between tabs, copy-pasting an account number from one window into another, hunting for the chat where someone pasted the number that matters. Mazy Dar gave the leak a name - the toggle tax - and then built a company around plugging it. Here, the firm he runs from 61 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, started life as a banking app in 2010, became a private browser for Wall Street trading desks, and in 2024 walked out into the rest of the working world.
Most founders sell a dream. Dar sells a refund - on time you didn't know you were spending. His pitch is almost rude in its plainness: the browser you stare at all day was engineered to surf the public internet, not to run the dozen applications your job actually depends on. So he is rebuilding it. Here is built on Google Chromium, stitches scattered apps into a single laid-out screen, and ships with an AI Center for dropping enterprise models straight into the workflow. The product is technical. The promise is human: stop making people the integration layer.
Companies can no longer afford browsers that were designed to surf the public internet. - Mazy Dar, on launching the Here Enterprise Browser
Dar's resume reads backwards from where you'd expect a browser CEO to start. He studied computer science and French literature at Cornell - a pairing that tells you he was never going to be only an engineer. His first finance job, in 1997, was writing software at SBC Warburg, the firm that became UBS. He was the person building the tools, not the one barking orders into a phone.
Then came Creditex, where he served as Chief Strategy Officer and built the company's electronic credit-derivatives businesses from the inside. When IntercontinentalExchange bought Creditex for $625 million in 2008, Dar landed on ICE's executive committee as VP of CDS strategy, running the e-trading and processing platforms. He had seen, up close, what happens when a market drags its messy desktop into the electronic age. The clutter was the opportunity.
In 2010 he and Chuck Doerr started OpenFin to fix it. The two have worked together for more than 25 years, and Dar credits the partnership's survival to an unglamorous skill: the ability to say both yes and no to each other. Adam Toms came aboard as president and COO. The mission, in Dar's words, was to modernize and democratize how applications get built and pushed to enterprise desktops.
Here is the wager Dar made a company on: stop forcing every application to be welded to every other application. Let them talk a common language instead. He compares it to the way Apple and Google let third-party apps slot cleanly into a phone. On the trader desktop, that common language is FDC3 - a standard Dar likes to describe as "a FIX Protocol for the trader desktop." Get the applications speaking it, and firms stop paying for expensive one-off integrations.
The elegance is that nothing has to be torn out. "Firms employing legacy systems are no longer forced to upend their entire technology infrastructure," he has said - a concept he calls desktop unbundling. The decades-old systems stay. The new apps simply plug in around them. For an industry that treats its plumbing as load-bearing, that is the difference between a sale and a non-starter.
After almost fifteen years, Dar and Doerr noticed something: the thing they'd built for banks worked anywhere people drown in apps - contact centers, hospitals, wealth-management desks. So they rebranded to Here, kept the OpenFin name for the financial products, and pointed the technology at the wider world. The fundraise and the rebrand happened almost on top of each other, held together by what Dar calls "lots of open communication" with the team, board, and advisers.
// Figures Here cites for the cost of app-switching, and the productivity uplift it promised at CCW 2024.
"The trader desktop has become increasingly cluttered."
"Interoperability is the solution to these administrative difficulties."
"We pride ourselves on having flexible software capable of accommodating all sorts of applications."
"Firms employing legacy systems are no longer forced to upend their entire technology infrastructure."
"Companies can no longer afford to operate with the inefficient paradigm of browsers that were designed to surf the public internet."
He calls the open standard "a FIX Protocol for the trader desktop."
He studied computer science and French literature at Cornell. Half the brain in syntax, half in Stendhal.
His first Wall Street job was writing the software, not trading the book.
He has partnered with the same co-founder, Chuck Doerr, for 25+ years - a tech marriage longer than most startups exist.
Before browsers, he helped sell an electronic-trading business for $625 million.
The company kept the OpenFin name for its financial products even after becoming Here. Old loyalties die hard.
His investor roster - JPMorgan, Barclays, HSBC, Wells Fargo, CME, Bain Capital Ventures - reads like a who's-who of the firms his product runs on.
Dar's ambition is the same idea pushed one step further: take the interoperability and security his team built for the world's largest banks and hand it to everyone who lives inside a browser - call-center agents, clinicians, wealth managers. With an AI Center now built into Here, the goal sharpens from organizing your apps to having software act inside them. The toggle tax, he is betting, was never a Wall Street problem. It was just discovered there first.
Know someone drowning in browser tabs? They'll feel seen.