AI browsers have been all the craze in 2025. Corporations massive and small tried to construct browsers that baked in AI in an effort to personal the interface individuals use to browse the web.
How the turns have tabled. Right now, OpenAI’s Atlas is historical past, and The Browser Firm offered to Atlassian, with its Dia browser now specializing in productiveness use instances. Firefox tried to strike a steadiness in its personal AI efforts by offering an off-switch, however it received shouted at anyway.
This 12 months, the main focus has shifted to brokers and automation. Startups like Strawberry, Browser Use, and Apart are constructing browsers with an agentic slant, and even Perplexity’s Comet has moved in direction of offering browser brokers.
Amid this transformation, a startup referred to as Polar has come out with an AI-first browser geared toward information employees, and it has now raised a $5.7 million seed spherical led by Madrona.
CEO, Kevin Jiang, who beforehand labored at Perplexity on Comet, mentioned the primary wave of AI browsers aimed to alter default seek for customers and have them chat with tabs for doing duties like journey reserving, which wasn’t a powerful long-term proposition.
“If you concentrate on end-user customers, they don’t guide a flight or make a reservation every single day or each week. There wasn’t a powerful pull for mass customers to go to an AI browser and discover worth in it. That’s why our AI browser isn’t targeted in any respect on mass customers. We’re targeted on the place we predict browser brokers are literally worthwhile, which is information work,” Jiang informed TechCrunch.
With Polar, customers can schedule workflows, save prompts and assign duties to brokers based mostly on their open tabs. The corporate says the browser will be simply utilized by non-technical customers, and may help with work like gross sales, recruitment, advertising, analysis and enterprise operations.
The browser itself is free to make use of, and also you get just a few each day credit to spend on AI duties. Customers that need larger credit score limits will pay for subscription plans ranging from $20 monthly.
Polar says most of its present consumer base simply makes use of its browser for automating duties whereas utilizing one other browser as their each day driver. The startup’s objective is to turn out to be a instrument for automation, and it believes that the browser is at present the easiest way to do it. Nonetheless, it’s open to exploring different avenues, comparable to laptop use.
Sabrina Albert, a accomplice at Madrona, mentioned automating duties for information employees is a big market.
“I believe that the exhausting half is constructing actually dependable agentic work on the open, logged-in net. Constructing an online browser has an entire set of various benefits of understanding how customers work together and have interaction with web sites. Plus, they’re logged into most of those web sites, giving the instrument entry to providers they use probably the most,” she mentioned over a name.
The spherical additionally noticed participation from ex-GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Phia founder Phoebe Gates, Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson, Flapping Airplanes co-founder Benjamin Spector, Etched co-founder Rob Wachen, and Elementary Analysis Labs co-founder and CEO Robert Yang.
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