
A guitar lesson gave the Shopping.com and Adap.tv founder an idea for working together online. Then he had to decide whether the company he had built was solving the right problem.
The internet promised that software could talk to software. Then it hid the useful bits behind a login screen. Deck's bet is that an agent with its own computer can finish the conversation.
Browserbase gives software agents real cloud browsers, then handles the messy parts: logins, broken pages, bot defenses, and proof of what happened. Its customers are discovering that the most useful AI task may be the one hiding in an ordinary website.

Bardeen can turn a messy hunt across tabs into a tidy lead list. The clever bit is where it works - inside the browser - and that is also where buyers should look closely before handing over the keys.

Before Avyay Varadarajan built infrastructure for AI agents, he studied what makes a three-pointer fall. His career keeps returning to one question: what turns a promising attempt into repeatable performance?
Dari (YC F25) is a San Francisco startup building an API for reliable browser-use agents. Instead of calling an LLM on every run - which makes most browser agents slow, expensive, and non-deterministic - Dari learns a web workflow once, then caches the deterministic DOM steps so it can replay them reliably. It auto-handles 2FA (SMS codes, TOTP, email verification), detects when a site changes and adapts with AI, and exposes each automation as a versioned, stateful API endpoint. Founded by Caltech CS grads Avyay Varadarajan and Benjamin Hong.
FirstWork is a San Francisco-based, YC S24 enterprise AI company building autonomous agents that automate workforce operations for frontline and seasonal labor. Its platform handles document verification, credentialing, continuous compliance, and worker onboarding inside a company's existing systems, cutting time-to-hire and onboarding by up to 80%. Founded in 2024 by Vardhan Kapoor (ex-Remitly, Deliveroo) and Shubham Choudhary (ex-Deel, Rippling), FirstWork raised a $5M seed round led by Gradient and serves staffing, logistics, delivery, and care companies including Deel, Job&Talent, Relay, and Wonolo.
RamAIn is a San Francisco startup (YC W26) building fast computer-use AI agents that operate legacy systems, desktop apps and web portals the same way a person does - reading the screen, clicking buttons, filling forms - without needing API access or custom integrations. Founded by IIT Delhi dropouts Shourya Vir Jain and Vansh Ramani, it turns any repetitive UI task into a managed, self-healing API and targets enterprise back-office work in procurement, insurance, healthcare and finance.
TesterArmy is a Y Combinator-backed (P26) startup building AI agents that test web and mobile apps the way a human would. Teams describe tests in plain English; the agent launches a real browser or device, clicks and types through user flows, handles logins, OAuth and OTP, then returns screenshots, recordings and actionable bug reports. It runs on every GitHub pull request and on a schedule against production, aiming to catch broken flows before customers do.
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Magical is a San Francisco software company building AI agents and browser-based automation that move data between apps and websites without formal integrations. It started life as a free Chrome extension for text expansion and form autofill used by roughly a million people at companies like Amazon, Airbnb and Netflix, then pivoted toward agentic AI that runs multi-step operational work - increasingly focused on healthcare revenue-cycle and patient-access tasks. Founded in 2020 during the COVID lockdown by the husband-and-wife team of Harpaul Sambhi and Rosie Chopra, the company has raised roughly $41 million, led by a $35M Series A from Coatue.
Simular is a Palo Alto-based AI company building autonomous computer-use agents that operate desktops, browsers, and phones the way a person does - clicking, typing, and navigating graphical interfaces. Its open-source Agent S framework and its always-on assistant Sai use a neuro-symbolic approach that turns exploratory agent runs into deterministic, auditable code to reduce hallucinations. Founded in 2023 by former Google DeepMind researchers Ang Li and Jiachen Yang, Simular has raised about $26.5M and posts state-of-the-art results on computer-use benchmarks.
TinyFish is a Palo Alto-based enterprise infrastructure company building web agents that let AI reliably navigate and act on the live web at scale. Its agents log in, fill forms, extract structured data, and complete multi-step workflows across thousands of sites at once - handling tasks like real-time hotel inventory aggregation, competitive price monitoring, and market intelligence. Founded in 2024 by Sudheesh Nair, Shuhao Zhang, and Keith Zhai, the company launched publicly in August 2025 with a $47M Series A led by ICONIQ, and counts Google, DoorDash, and Fortune 500 brands among its customers.