Browserbase has secured $40 million in fresh funding to expand its web automation platform beyond developers, as demand surges from AI startups and enterprises alike. The Series B round, led by Notable Capital with participation from existing investors CRV and Kleiner Perkins, values the company at $300 million, nearly four times its valuation during its last raise in September.
Founded just 16 months ago by Paul Klein IV, the San Francisco-based startup has quietly become a critical layer for companies building AI agents and automating workflows at scale. Its infrastructure spins up thousands of “headless browsers” browsers without a user interface to let software, not humans, navigate websites, click buttons, and retrieve data. This architecture allows Browserbase’s clients to automate actions across the internet with speed and precision.
“It can be a little contrarian to say, but we’re not going to rewrite the whole internet for AI,” Klein told Upstarts. “AI is going to get so smart that it’s able to use the internet for you.”
That premise has struck a chord with developers and startups alike. Over 20,000 developers have run more than 50 million browser sessions on Browserbase in 2025 alone already double the total volume from all of 2024. The company now serves more than 1,000 paying customers, including AI-forward players like Commure, 11x, Perplexity, and Vercel. Revenue has crossed $3 million, driven largely by expanding usage from existing teams. Browserbase charges on a consumption basis.
While the company has largely catered to developers, it’s now broadening its audience with a new product called Director. Director allows non-technical users to set up browser automations and generate code via natural language prompts. Klein compares the tool to Vercel’s app builder v0. In a demo, a user asks Director to open a browser and check inventory or shipping times tasks that are then automatically converted into reusable code.
“Stepping out of our comfort zone to sell not just to developers, but anybody, is new for us and really fun,” said Klein.
That includes industries far removed from Silicon Valley. Klein notes that dental practices have shown interest in using Director for automating billing and insurance pre-authorizations.
The company has also rolled out several infrastructure updates alongside its funding announcement:
- Stagehand for Python: Previously limited to Node.js, Browserbase’s automation framework now supports Python, with added features such as session recordings, token tracking, and detailed logging.
- Price reductions: The Hobby Developer plan has been cut from $39 to $20 per month. Concurrent browser limits have increased across tiers, and new variable-size browser instances are available for scale customers.
Browserbase’s origin traces back to Klein’s time at Twilio, where he interned in 2016 and later held technical roles for three years. After co-founding and selling his livestreaming startup Stream Club to Mux, Klein began fielding questions from peers on how to use headless browsers for AI workloads. After dozens of such conversations, he saw the opportunity for a product.
“After the 50th conversation, it became clear that there could be a product here,” he recalled.
Companies had long used scripts to scrape websites, often for competitive intelligence or research. But Browserbase aimed to build a more robust, compliant system focused on automation rather than pure data extraction. That nuance is important, Klein says: “We’re not really a scraping company. We focus more on automation.”
Still, some of its customers use the product for scraping adjacent workflows. Pursuit, a startup that sells to the public sector, previously built its own infrastructure to scan local government websites for procurement data. After switching to Browserbase, Pursuit now monitors more than 130,000 websites, combining that data with FOIA-submitted purchase orders to help sales teams prioritize outreach.
“This data is required by law to be public,” said Pursuit co-founder and CTO Brandon Max. “And we think it’s better for our kids to grow up in a place where the government gets better services for cheaper.”
Browserbase currently vets large-scale use cases under internal compliance guidelines akin to a ‘Know Your Customer’ approach and has yet to receive any takedown or legal complaints. “We’ve entered a new era where lots of non-humans going on the internet is actually good,” said Notable Capital managing director Glenn Solomon, whose firm also backed Vercel.
Open-source also remains central to Browserbase’s growth strategy. The company sponsors the ScrapegraphAI project and contributes to Stagehand, which is downloaded over 1.3 million times per month. One of its engineers is dedicated full-time to open-source development.
Structify, a startup that builds custom datasets, uses Browserbase for large-scale automated projects. “We’re trying to fight for the pragmatic future,” said Klein. Structify co-founder Ronak Gandhi credits the Browserbase team for going beyond just offering software: “They’ve scaled temporary capacity for us and helped us directly over Slack.”
While competitors are emerging including those building similar infrastructure in-house, Browserbase’s pay-as-you-go pricing and responsiveness have helped it retain loyalty. Perplexity, one of its customers, has even acquired Comet, a separate browser automation startup, to support its own assistant product.
With fresh capital in hand, Browserbase plans to grow its 30-person team and hire more aggressively. Its first salesperson joined only this week, with Klein leading sales himself up to now. The company says its long-term goal is to be the automation layer of the internet whether the user is a developer, a business analyst, or an AI agent.
“We’re building the best browser infrastructure platform, the most powerful framework, and the most accessible application to make that vision reality,” Klein wrote in the launch announcement. “We can’t wait to see what everyone builds.”
