Paul Klein IV (founder of Browserbase) describes Browserbase’s role providing cloud browser infrastructure that enables AI agents to perform web tasks. He outlines three products—Browserbase (infrastructure), Stagehand (an open-source, LLM-friendly browser control framework), and Director/Director AI (a prompt-driven tool for building web automations)—and situates this work in the broader shift to "software 3.0" (agentic software that uses models and tool calls).
Questions this video answers
Paul Klein IV.
Browserbase (referred to as Browser Base).
Stagehand.
stagehand.dev.
Director (Director AI).
Chapters
Hey, everybody, I am the other browser guy, founder of Browser Base. Thanks so much for sticking around. And if you're going to the bathroom, wait like five minutes. All right? This about to blow your mind with a little bit more some different takes on browsers. Well, if you don't know me, I'm the founder of Browser Base. We help AI agents browse the web by providing browser infrastructure for AI. So we're not a browser, we're browser infrastructure. And the future of software is software doing work on our behalf. But a lot of the work that you and I do is often in a web browser. I don't want to use a browser to do work for me. I want my software to do work for me. I want TurboTax to go to the SEC website and, and submit that form. I don't want to open my browser and do that. So if we want software to do work on our behalf, but we all use browsers, we need to give software a browser. And knowledge workers are doing so much work with software, they're transferring information from one piece of software to another. I mean, raise your hand if you've done that before, right? You've gone to Salesforce, downloaded the CSV, put it into clay. Our software is not interconnected, and it's frankly because the lack of access of APIs and the ubiquity of integrations that are needed to make software truly agentic. In Andre Krapathy's software 3.0 talk, he talked about how all of software needs to be rebuilt to be agentic. And I thought that talk was very inspiring. So much of the software we use every single day is going to be rebuilt. And when it's being rebuilt, what are these new capabilities or functions it's going to have? Well, like we said earlier, if software's going to do work on our behalf, and a lot of the work that we do every single day is in a web browser, we need software to have access to that web browser. And that's what we're building at browserbase, that browser infrastructure. And I just want to double down. We're not building a browser. We are not building a browser company. Some people get confused. I got some text messages saying, congratulations on the acquisition by Atlassian. Wrong browser company. We're browser based. What we do is we provide browser infrastructure and we run the same browser that you and I use every single day in a cloud environment. We're running consumer software in a cloud environment. That's a very challenging technical problem. But we want to make sure we're Giving this new generation of software, this software 3.0, more capabilities, empowering those with our browser infrastructure. Now, this isn't science fiction. Large companies are exploring Agentix software. I actually saw a job ad for Visa and they were hiring a Vibe coder. And you might wonder why are people hiring Vibe coders at these Fortune 500 companies? They've actually kind of realized that buying enterprise software with extremely expensive implementation timelines that, that have a failure rate that's quite high is pretty inefficient. Instead, you could hire a senior engineer to Vibe code something with your business logic and use the latest and greatest infrastructure models and tools that these large B2B software providers are using. You can Vibe code custom software at the enterprise level now, easier than ever. And that's quite, quite powerful. And because everyone is a vibe coder in 2025, you want to think about what layers you own. You don't need to Vibe code your infrastructure. It's actually quite dangerous. If you're Vibe coding mission critical infrastructure, you're making a big risk if the software fails. But Vibe coding, the business logic and the UI layer, that's a little bit more tolerable. And that's often the most expensive part of B2B SaaS. It's layered on top of infrastructure they use. Everyone in the end is an AWS wrapper, right? Or maybe a Oracle cloud wrapper after today's earnings. So the role of infrastructure is changing. In the software 3.0 world, we're going to have software that's leveraging infrastructure more and more and more, and especially software that uses agentic features that are powered by models, tool calls and even browsers. And I think that's really powerful because in the world of software 2.0 we had APIs and databases. In the world of software 3.0, we have models and tool calls. And I think that we are seeing a lot of protocols come out. MCP A2A open API. But the DMV is not going to have an MCP server, especially not under this administration. Right? It's going to be a long time for the rest of the Internet catches up. But this software revolution is happening today, right? It's happening right now. So how do we build a bridge to the legacy software that we all depend on? Once again, the browser. I know I'm beating a dead horse, guys. So I'll talk a little bit about our product next. At Browserbase, we're building three different products to help anybody automate the web. First of all, we're browser based browser Base is browser infrastructure. This is the browser that you all use, but deployed at scale in the cloud for developers to leverage. It's very, very painful to run consumer software at scale. Infrastructure teams try and deal with this all day long. But the browser, like on your laptop, it takes a lot of memory. CPU Chrome is probably the thing that slows down your laptop more than anything else. At browserbase, we make it so engineering teams can leverage many, many browsers without worrying about it. They can watch replays of what happened in the browser, debug it, and understand exactly what's happening in their browser infrastructure. We build crazy fast browser infrastructure for Stagehand. Stagehand is our open source framework. Now, if you have the browser infrastructure, you need a way for AI to control that browser. Stagehand is the code interface for the browser. And we've rewritten the way that programmers talk to browsers in a way that's more friendly to large language models. Instead of telling it, click this specific button, it's the fifth div on the page, it's red. We say, click the login button. And we use models provided by our customers to turn that into an actual action. Stagehand is open source and used by some of the largest companies out there right now. And you could actually try today, it's at stagehand.dev. but I think this is more of a venture Y crowd. So I think this product is really the one that I'd love for you to try. It's called Director and Director AI enables anyone to build web automations with just a single prompt. But it's not an agent. It's a tool for building Agentix software. And we wanted to teach this more and more. Like, you need to build Agentix software that can think and use tools and take these actions to automate things for you. Anybody can automate software now. Anyone can automate the web in tools that director Stagehand and browsers make it very easy. I'll kind of end with that because I know I'm running short on time. At browserbase, we're building the future of infrastructure that's powering software, the future of software and this future of software, software that works on your behalf. So if you're a startup, if you're an investor, if you're just someone who's really tired of having to go book those tennis courts at Dolores park, try using software that can automate for you. I think you'll find it really exciting. Thank you all so much, I appreciate it.
