AI browsers had been all the fashion in 2025. Firms massive and small tried to construct browsers that baked in AI in an effort to personal the interface folks use to browse the web.
How the turns have tabled. At present, 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, but it surely bought shouted at anyway.
This 12 months, the main target 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 alteration, a startup known as Polar has come out with an AI-first browser aimed 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 vary 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 consider end-user customers, they don’t ebook a flight or make a reservation on daily basis 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 just isn’t targeted in any respect on mass customers. We’re targeted on the place we expect browser brokers are literally beneficial, which is information work,” Jiang instructed 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 may be simply utilized by non-technical customers, and might 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 a number of day by day credit to spend on AI duties. Customers that need greater credit score limits pays for subscription plans ranging from $20 per 30 days.
Polar says most of its present consumer base simply makes use of its browser for automating duties whereas utilizing one other browser as their day by day driver. The startup’s purpose is to change into a software for automation, and it believes that the browser is presently one of the simplest ways to do it. Nonetheless, it’s open to exploring different avenues, reminiscent of pc use.
Sabrina Albert, a associate at Madrona, mentioned automating duties for information employees is a large market.
“I believe that the exhausting half is constructing actually dependable agentic work on the open, logged-in net. Constructing an online browser has a complete 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 software entry to companies they use essentially 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 Basic Analysis Labs co-founder and CEO Robert Yang.
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