How Browserbase Raised $67.5M to Power AI Agents & Vibe Coders

The drop this pod the day we're announcing our Series B fundraise which was led by Notable Capital Glenn Solomon joining our board. This is a company that's only about 15 months old. Jeff Lawson, the CEO and founder of Twilio, Guillermo from Vercel, Patrick Hallsson from Stripe. I feel like I have Thanos, rings of dev tools, people that I really respect. Great thing about Vercel, Twilio and Stripe is they all built category defining companies. That's what I seek to build with Browserbase.

$40 million Series B. What does this bring your total funding to?

67 and a half million more opportunity to grow our business, help more customers and really double down on this crazy idea. AI is going to control your browser and do tasks on your behalf online.

Paul, welcome to Sorcery.

Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

I'm so excited to have you on and I love the merch, you know I love merch.

We got the bees on Series B browser.

Series B. That's right. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Could you share more about the round?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean we didn't just get the hats for the round, the company is browser based. But no, we're excited to the drop this pod. The day we're announcing our Series B fund raise which was led by Notable Capital Glenn Solomon joining our board and we're excited. This is a company, it's only about 15 months old and to go from zero to four rounds of fundraising. And also I got married. It's been a pretty busy year and it's just more opportunity to grow our business, help more customers and really double down on this crazy idea that AI is going to control your browser and do tasks on your behalf online. And we get to play a small part of that.

And this was a $40 million Series B?

Yes.

What does this bring your total funding to?

So all in, it's 67 and a half million though I kind of wish we just raised the extra 500k so I didn't need that extra half. But no, 67 and a half million. And we have a bunch of great investors, Kleiner Perkins, CRV Base, Case Capital, as well as a bunch of great angel investors. Just everyone I really admired and looked up to is now in some way involved in browser base, which means we have a good team around us to keep doing what we want to do.

It's amazing. And before we go too deep, I do have to say thank you to John from Strike Capital for the intro. And also Bucky Moore was a previous investor at Kleiner and he gave really great questions. So we have some awesome questions.

He's got the inside scoop. So.

Yeah, I know a lot about your personal life.

There we go. That's good. I build in public, you know, everything.

Okay, so to start, can we break down browser base for some people? The audience is like pretty diverse, so there might be beginners, there might be more technical people, there might more finance people. What is browser based to the normal person?

Yeah, absolutely. So when I think about browser base, first to start with, what is all of the work that we do in our day to day lives? A lot of that is in a web browser. You know, we're interacting with software, we're interacting with web apps. You might go to Crunchbase pretty often and there's this idea that we want AI to do work on our behalf. AI is going to take some tasks that we have and take care of them for us. And if we want AI to do the same work that we're doing, we need AI to use a web browser to work the same way we do. And Browser base is providing that web browser as an infrastructure product to developers who are building these AI features that are going to use in your day to day life. So you think of us as a developer tool. We're an infrastructure platform and our product is browsers at scale. So if you want your AI to control the web, you need to give it a browser. We provide that browser. It's kind of like a database company in some ways. Right. Every application has these primitives, maybe storing data, maybe it's like manipulating images. And also now it's controlling a browser. And not only do we provide the browser infrastructure, browsers at scale in the cloud, but we also have this framework called Stagehand and it's the code interface for the browser which gives developers and LLMs an easy way to programmatically control a browser. So to break it all down, if you're building some sort of cool new software, some AI agent that's going to go to Kalshi's website and place a wager, you're going to need to say, hey, I go to this website, find the appropriate bet, click the bet button and then submit my information. Those are all programmatic commands. Browser base is the runtime for those commands. We run the browser as well as give you a lot of tools to make that easier.

So that's a great use case. But what are some other like typical, like daily use cases that people use in their workflows?

Yeah, there's a ton. I mean you can kind of think of the primitives at work of like, you know, you're going to a website, you are filling in forms, you're probably reading data on a website, you're probably clicking some buttons and then you may be downloading and uploading files. A use case that I use browsers for recently was I had to file my Delaware franchise tax. And if you ever had to do that as a founder, it is a really annoying web form on the Delaware website where you go in, you fill in your cap table and you correct some information, you submit that, you know, I don't think that people need to be doing all this, you know, repeated form submission all the time. They can build software using AI to do it for them and, and browser kind of powers that. So it's a lot of the boring stuff and it's the stuff where there's probably not first party integrations. You know, if you're going to go book a flight or find a restaurant, why not just use the Open Table API or you know, a flight booking API? But, but if you're going to, you know, try and renew your driver's license, the DMV is not going to have an MCP server or some sort of API or some sort of first party AI integration. It's going to be this, you know, website that people have to interact with. And there's many, many websites that exist both in the United States and globally. We see a lot of adoption globally of people who built websites for people to use, but now they want AI to automate those websites and people are using browserbase to automate, you know, getting quotes for lumber in Mexico or finding all the seven 7 11s that are open in Japan. These are things that there's not going to be first party integrations available for. And browser base is that primitive, that powers all of it.

This might pop up a couple times during the conversation, but what does MCP mean for people that don't know?

Sure, yeah, that's a great, great question. So there's this way that people are exposing tools to AP to AI and the Model Context Protocol is one of those ways that you can standardize and give your AI a set of tools to call. So Browser Base has a way to expose the browser to your agent via MCP or MCP Server. But more and more developers are trying to find ways to integrate more functionalities to their AI agents and you know, browser bases. Browsers are one of those primitive functionalities and the MCP is just one way to integrate it into your software and.

You've also mentioned that browser base is like the Twilio for headless browser. So what does that mean?

When I think about Twilio, I think of a company that built APIs for telephony. You know, you can use Twilio to programmatically send a text message or programmatically make a voice call. And a lot of those primitives carry over the browser to browser base. You know, we're building an infrastructure company that developers can use to programmatically go to a website and fill in a form or programmatically collect data off of a website. These are primitives that people are building into applications. Twilio sold to developers, we sell to developers. There's a lot of similar business models there. And I'm very lucky to have Jeff Lawson, the CEO and founder of Twilio, as an angel investor. And he's been instrumental in the growth of this company and a big advisor to me.

That's amazing. Do you have any other kinds of advisors that have helped you along the way?

Yeah, you know, I think Guillermo from Vercel has also been a very inspirational person for us and we're lucky to have them both as a customer and an investor. Patrick calls him from Stripe, another angel investor that we're really happy to have on board. I kind of feel like I have Thanos, rings of dev tools, people that I really respect. The great thing about Vercel, Twilio and Stripe is they all built category defining companies. That's what I seek to build with Browser Base. I want to build a company that defines a category, in our case browser infrastructure, and really builds everything within that category so that developers can use us to build these primitives into their applications. So as a kid when I started programming, I was building little software applications and I wanted them to do stuff for me and that was really hard. I wanted to like look at my practice schedule on the school website. And developers want to interact with software in the rest of the world and the way to do that up until now has been very painful. But with browser based and headless browsers, we give developers the ability to control a browser and really interact with the rest of the Internet and that unlocks a lot of really cool software opportunities.

I heard that you have over 700 customers, is that right?

We actually just crossed a thousand.

Oh my God. You've crossed over a thousand customers.

It's really exciting. It's a lot of mouths to feed, but for our 25 person team, but we're really thankful for it and our product led growth approach makes it so that you know, every customer can self service, they can sign up, when they grow, they can talk to our sales team. But you know, it's been really cool to see customers start with us when they're like maybe a pre seed company and then now we had a customer of ours just raised our series B as well so that we can be with them along the whole duration of the journey. And, and our scalable model does make it quite nice where we can service a lot of customers with a lot of low friction.

What's the typical profile for your customers? Does it span a range? If it's self serve, is it a lot of consumers? How does it work?

Yeah, they're all businesses, all startups. So we're very much B2B, mostly developers. I think the customer profile of browser base has really changed over time. In the early days when people were just kind of building on the edge of AI in early 2024, it was a lot of startups, it was a lot of people and hey, we were a startup ourselves so we didn't really earn the right to go get a larger customer until we grew more and really proved out our infrastructure. These days we see customers from all different types of business sizes. From still the early stage startup that's innovating to maybe the scale up that has 1,000 employees and really wants to double down on some internal automation they're building or the publicly traded company that already used some sort of headless browser technology in their cloud and wants to look to what's new and what's innovative. So it really has spanned a lot more different types of companies as we've grown. But I think that's very traditional for infrastructure companies. You prove yourself out to these early startups and then over time as your platform becomes better, you win the right to work with larger companies that can trust you with their cloud infrastructure.

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Yeah, for us I've really thought about what do those category defining companies do? Well and for browser base we are building in a new category. We earned our spot on the market map, right. And created that. So to do category creation you have to do a lot of top level awareness. You have to show people this is a thing and if you want to, you know, do some sort of automation of a browser, you should think of browser base. So I think it's a lot more top of funnel awareness than other infrastructure companies do. If you're building another database company. Well, databases are kind of a well known problem, right. And you can go maybe more top down sales led go into the customers that are in your ICP that need that problem. But for us we're inspiring a market of developers to go build. Our biggest limitation of market is actually how many people can we inspire. So on go to market we spend a bunch of time doing a lot more awareness, a lot more brand development, a lot more category creation to inspire developers to get started building on us. A lot of our customers are greenfield, so they're just starting and building these features and at the same time I'm a solo founder so you ask how do I break down go to market and product? Well, I do a lot of both and I'm lucky to have great teams on our EPD or engineering product design and our go to market teams and great leaders on both of those teams actually. But in the end I think there's not much difference because if you're building great product, you can put that on the market and inspire people. So I think they actually are very closely interlinked. We don't build one off features for customers. We have 1,000 customers now and the way that we do product development is like every time we ship a new feature it's like well how many of our customers will this impact and what's the greatest common denominator of requests that we can ship in a feature? And when you have a large enough base of customers, you get good direction on where you need to take the product to really improve it. And we just kind of listen to the customers build that and then tell our customers about the features we're building and they end up talking about it out in the world too. And we get to amplify that and support them and be their biggest cheerleader. I'll end with this. Our pricing models really align with the customer because we're usage based. We only win when they win, we only win when our customers succeed and they ship to produce. So a lot of the work I do is how can I help my customers win? How can I tell them, hey, like here's how you should launch this product or here's some feedback I have after I use it because I really want our customers to have breakout success so we can be powering them and hopefully play a small part in their journey to building something very great.

What are some of your most proud go to market strategy moments?

Well, I think every fundraiser we do a good job. I think we really are figuring out how to anchor around a single day, a single moment of trying to dominate the timeline. And that's just because it's hard to get, you know, corral a whole cap table to constantly be engaged. They're busy, they have a lot of investments. We work with like pretty busy people, right. So I try and focus all of our energy onto these big launch days. Up until recently they've been tied with fundraising announcements though that's probably not the most sustainable thing ever. We want to launch stuff. I really like how Brian Chesky and Airbnb does their like launch days and I think they really try and channel the energy.

How do they do them?

They do like, like every season is like a new launch release where they released like this new design for Airbnb recently and they have a whole event around it. So I think traditionally people have done a lot more like a launch week where you see a bunch of features come out over a week. I don't have the attention span to wait a week to see people launch stuff. I like to try and do it all in one day. So if you look at our series A announcement, which the the copy for that was the next billion dollar companies are going to be built on browser base. And that's now true. We have unicorns using browser base. And then at the seed it was like, I forget what it was but it was this very clip driven approach. It's like, hey, why is AI not delivering? It's because of the infrastructure and we have a Roomba running into a wall and it's like, this is AI. It's like, come on. And then for the pre seed, it was really kind of planting our flag in that the future is AI doing work on your behalf. So we've always tried to have really good messaging alongside each fundraise. And I do think what we do extremely well at Browserbase is messaging. And I think that's the most important thing for a startup is, is your message, is the thing you're building, getting across to customers. And we spend a lot of time internally drafting the copy and the messaging we use so people understand why this thing is so important to us.

And what's the typical language for that? Like, I know some people like to go after more stunt marketing, some people like to go after more technical stuff. In terms of videos, maybe it's lots of demo videos. How do you think about all those different kinds of media content?

Yeah, you know, it's a lot of video. I think people love video these days, but it's also supplemented with really concise copy. So for us, messaging is so important and we think about who are we trying to message to. It's the builders. Everyone is building something now, right. And when they're building something, they need the right tools. And if we can offer them some of the right tools, I think that will really help them feel like they have that support from early days to build great products. Regardless, for us, I really don't think there's one single silver bullet, but it's really like, how do you have complementary pieces of content where it's like, maybe it's legacy media, maybe it's traditional pr, maybe it's something that goes viral because it's a little stunty. Right. We have a lot in store for the Series B announcement. For the Series A, we flew a plane over San Francisco and had a little banner. Yeah, that was really fun. Would I do it again? Probably not. But, you know, like, I think we're always trying to try new things and see what has the best roi and really what, like, gets our customers and prospects excited about browser base and see that we are really trying to grow this thing to be a much bigger business.

Who needs billboards when you can have planes flying over sf?

They're way cheaper too.

Are they really?

Yeah, they're not that bad.

Is there a whole business for this?

There is. They make their. They make their margin on the banner, not on the plane. Okay.

Can you take a ride if you want.

I asked that I really wanted to put someone in the plane. They said no, but that would have been pretty Epic. Maybe I have to pay a little. The next tier of plane is where you can have an engineer sitting alongside there taking contest.

Get an engineer on the plane.

I'll work on it, you know, or.

Maybe let's scratch that. Let's get you on a Dragon capsule.

Wow. Yeah, that might be a little bit. Maybe the series F can go fly up there. That'd be pretty fun.

Is Twitter your biggest distribution channel? How do you think about the different media channels?

It is. I definitely use Twitter the most for getting stuff out there. I think it's just because I've built the audience there and like I try and direct people there. I'm trying to get better at LinkedIn. Marty Kraus Shout out Marty just dominates LinkedIn from Pylon. He's so good at it. And I, I think that like, I kind of have always try and been like one channel and actually the journey of browsbase in 2024 we started, my goal was that when you thought about headless browser infrastructure, you thought about browser base and specifically those people in San Francisco in the AI space thought about browser base. So I really tried to go where they were, which was on X and it was, you know, at events and really trying to get into that market. Now that we're going more broad and we're trying to target more types of companies, we are trying to shift across more channels, we're doing more YouTube, more LinkedIn and still trying to like find the breakout success there that we found on X. But we're definitely seeing good results and I think we just have to get better at multi channel and as we bring more people onto our team, they bring their own expertise in certain channels and I'm excited about some of the success we've had there.

Can't wait to see you on Instagram.

Yeah, that's the final frontier. Watch out. Maybe traded vc. We'll have a post on the series B day or something, right? Or TikTok. I think we have our first TikTok coming out today, so it's fun. I don't know if developers are using TikTok to discover content yet. I know they're using YouTube, so they love YouTube. Yeah, developers love you.

Yeah.

So we've done a lot of YouTube partnerships. We've sponsored great creators. Theo. Theo Brown has done some really good stuff with us as a sponsor. So I love supporting creators. I think it's actually such a great use of, you know, marketing spend because then they become advocates, they end up giving you great feedback and hopefully you're building champions with the creators you work with.

And the word of mouth is like incredible. All you have to do is go to an event and like you're at the table and you're talking with people or whatever. But the influence is like really, really strong of word of mouth in person and all of that organic kind of.

Yeah. Word of mouth is probably our biggest channel of growth for Browser Base. When we look at the sign up attribution, one that's been growing quite a bit is actually I heard about browsers from AI, so I'm very. So yeah, I think 15% of our signups came from. Well, I told me about Browser Base.

What do you mean?

I, yeah, like ChatGPT or you know, maybe they were like, hey, what tool should I use for this problem? And Browser Base is now in the models context and being recommended, which is super exciting because it's something that like I thought would take much longer to have like some sort of impact on our signups. But no, it's happening today and I'm, I'm still trying to figure out the right way to encourage that more. I think it's the same, you know, content playbook you use for SEO. Put a lot of written content out there, make sure it's scrapable, make sure elements could get that into its, its context as well as, you know, making sure we have our content in other places with good backlinks. I think a lot of the SEO playbook is also true for like AI SEO, but it's, it's having results on our signups and it's pretty cool to see. I never thought I would tell people to go buy Browser Base.

That's amazing. That's so co. I'm going to have to do some searches, some prompts later and see what I can get in terms of the branding. We have to go back to this.

Yes.

Your logo is an emoji that's pretty iconic. How did you come up with this idea?

Well, it's no longer an emoji for legal reasons. Apple does own the copyright to the emojis. But I think like owning your emojis is something that I think the guys from Morning Brew came up with this where it's like you need to have an emoji that's recognizable with your brand. That way your logo is installed on everyone's keyboard. Like if someone talks about browser, our logo is there or something that looks like our logo is there. Since then the branding has grown up quite a bit and we've taken the idea of what is b the building Block a square and it's grown into. Okay, well we stack the blocks, right? And there's browser base, our browser infrastructure. There's Stagehand, another emoji. I think it's this emoji and it's in a yellow block and they stack on top of each other. The framework works well with our infrastructure. So we've really kind of gotten to this idea of like, how are we building the building blocks for developers and browser based and Stagehand and our newest product we're launching today, Director AI those are all building blocks that kind of stack vertically on top of each other to help people solve this problem of web automation. And it's gotten very cubey for sure. A lot of cubes on our website everywhere. I don't have a Rubik's Cube in the office yet, but I probably need to get a browser.

I did see that. I think it was on one of your product pages. A nice Rubik's Cube.

There's many cubes everywhere, so we're going all out of the box.

You did bring up one thing, and that's the problem with the Internet. So what is the problem with the Internet today?

Yeah, you know, the Internet is vast, right. There are so many websites that have been built that we still depend on that are not changing, you know, and for people to interact with these legacy websites, it's humans are going there and interacting with them. There's no APIs or connectors. And I think that there's so much of this existing Internet, there's so much of existing infrastructure that people have to depend on and use every single day that we're probably not going to rewrite all of it. We're not going to rebuild a new Internet. We need to have the future of software which is AI powered, be able to interact with the old Internet. It's kind of like this analogy of we have Waymos, right? It's AI driving a car in San Francisco and it's doing a pretty good job. But shouldn't we just rebuild all the roads for Waymo so they can drive way faster and have their own lane and stuff? That'd be ideal, but probably unrealistic. So if you can have AI navigate the infrastructure we already have built, you're able to kind of really extend the impact of AI early on without needing to rebuild the rest of the world. And I think the same thing is true of the Internet, where we have this Internet that's legacy, like GeoCities and WordPress websites and old forms are still there. And we really want to Help AI bridge the gap to the legacy Internet. And that's why browserbase exists, is really to help bridge that gap.

How do you feel about the AI agent ecosystem?

I think it's early. I think there's still a lot of market patterns that are developing, but there's certainly breakout successes. I'm a big believer in vertical AI companies. I think they're doing quite a good job. I think there's constantly a debate around, well, won't ChatGPT Enterprise just eat up all of this market? I don't think that's the case at all. I think that to build a great vertical AI company like a Decagon, a Sierra or Harvey, you have to not only have a great product and proprietary information about how this workflow impacts a certain profession, but you also have to have like really great go to market skills to go get into the businesses that need this the most. And I think that vertical AI companies are going to continue to grow and if anything there might be more specific verticals and this be more competitive. You're going to have to compete with a company that's only doing compliance for farms. You know, it's not like the compliance company that's a vertical company might be getting, you know, picked apart and de bundled by more specific products. And I think that's going to be really interesting to see how things generalize in the vertical AI space. But there's certainly a lot more to be proved out. And it feels like the past two years has really flown by and there's a lot of success, a lot of revenue. But as things settle over the next several years, I'm curious to see how the markets shift and how different categories of vertical AI agent companies play out.

Would you classify browser base as an AI agent?

We're more of an infrastructure company, so we sit below them. Our customers are often building AI agents.

Do you think people think that you are?

I think Browserbase is a category creator which is still trying to define and share with the world what we're doing. So no, if you're watching this, we are not, we're not Even really an AI company. We're an infrastructure company. We help cut PNSU's model, but people bring their own models on Browserbase. Their models control our browsers. Right? So we're more of a primitive or a building block. And when you think about the LLM os, the LLM is the brain. The browser is just one of the tools it needs. Same with file system, same with video and voice inputs, same with embedding and Vector databases. These are all the primitives that help power these agentic applications. And we seek to build the default browser for AI.

Browser base is not an AI agent, it is infrastructure.

Yes, we are the only AI company in AI grant that spent like $0 on models while we were in AI grant. So we're very much, you know, server security compliance at scale, like making sure we give you all the tools and building blocks. That's where we spend a lot of our time.

Well, let's talk about security and compliance a little bit. So how do you think authentication lays into the whole theme of this?

It's a great question. That must be a bucky question.

Maybe.

How do I think that authentication lands in the future of AI? Well, I certainly think that your agent authenticating on your behalf is an important part of it browsing the web. If you want to have it to go book that flight, it probably needs to sign into your United account or maybe your JetBlue person your JetBlue account and buy it with miles. Right. But like sharing your password with an agent is not the easiest way to do things. And JetBlue doesn't have some sort of advanced agent authentication system set up yet. So one, it's like who is positioned to build AI agent authentication? And secondly, what about all the other companies that don't have that sophistication? I think that there's some really great opportunities for authentication providers. You know, one of our investors, Okta, the founders of Clerk, the founders of Stytch, the founders of Work os, all investors in browserbase. And it's because I believe that if you currently are using Work os, Stytch, Okta or Clerk, they can enable agent based authentication really easily. It's a switch because they already have the distribution. They're already doing login with those companies and sign up with those companies. Why not let your agent log in on your behalf? So they're very well positioned to solve that. But secondly, for the rest of the Internet, I'm really excited about like how can we let our agent log in on our behalf? And I see some really interesting opportunities with like 1Password or what if you could share your, you know, 1Password password with your agent and it has some sort of limited access, limited audited access to your password vault and it can go log in on your behalf and then like remove that access so it feels like the tools are there. But the biggest thing holding back AI agents from really browsing the web reliably is authentication. And there needs to be some innovation there, probably from a Couple very well.

Established companies you should partner with. World tools for humanity.

Yes, I think we should. I mean, I think there's like this idea of like, how do you authenticate people? And like captchas are really like proof of personhood.

I can't even do those honestly. Like I don't know where the tire ends and begins. It's too confusing.

They've gotten very sophisticated. Right. And it's challenging. But you know, CAPTCHAs exist because there was only bad bots on the Internet in the past. You know, they're mostly trying to take over your account or steal your credit card info, but now there's good bots. And how do you identify between good bots and bad bots when a capture just tries to block all bots? I think authentication helps solve that problem where, you know, your agent can say, hey, I'm working on behalf of Molly. This is her account. I'm going to help her book this flight. And at least they know it's Molly. And that proof of personhood or the delegated proof of personhood will help with the abuse and the capture problem. So that's one reason the authentication is really needed.

This goes into the topic of regulation and Kalshi has a really interesting market out on this right now. So do you think AI regulation will become federal law this year?

Yeah, this is, it's a good question. I think there will be some sort of regulation, right? Like especially around like deepfakes or video. Like it feels like you, if you use AI generated video to, you know, cause pain or harm or reputational harm to someone, is that standalone AI regulation or is that just part of defamation as like a law or classification? I don't think they're going to ban like models of a certain parameter size. So I bias on the broad. Yes, here there will be some AI regulation this year, but I'd have to look at the scope of the poll and see if it's all about training or something like that.

Well, I'll tell you right now, please. There's about a 35% chance right now on Kalshee.

Oh, that's a good one. That's a good.

Yeah, yeah. That it becomes federal law. But I know your point on the deepfakes in the video like I. The Google vo, vo, however you want to say. 3 is insane. It's so good. And I'm watching, you know, videos on my phone on like Instagram and I'm laughing at them because it's funny. And one of the jokes is like, your grandparents are going to be like in for a rude awakening because there's these like clips of, of like news reporters with like aliens in the background or like crazy events happening. And like, that's like kind of like a ha. Like silly use case. But that just mirrors like what potentially could actually be shared on the Internet.

Yeah, I think the opportunity for disinformation is really large and it's going to take some sort of, you know, proof of reality in media. Same thing along with like proof of personnel. I think there's just more. I'm not a crypto person, but it seems like there's a crypto solution here where it's like there's more proof of authentication if something is legit, that needs to be verifiable by everyone. And I think there's a lot of innovation left. Like, we're still so, so early in this new AI world with models and agents and all these like buzzwords and MCP that there's going to be stuff to be figured out. But I'm optimistic that there's so many people starting companies that people will figure this out and it's going to become net positive over the longer run.

Are there any product bets that you're making in LLMs or autonomous workflows?

Yeah, so we're actually launching a new product today, part of series B. Oh my God. First heard on Sorcery. Breaking news. Breaking news. And it's called Director. Director AI. And it kind of like goes with this theme around the rise of the Vibe coder. And what's really interesting is I kept talking to dentists. Dentists would book calls with us on browser saying, hey, like we are trying to automate this back office thing. I have cursor, I have Claude code, and I want to try and do this thing. I want to use browser base. I'm like, wow, that's awesome. Like, these dentists are, hey, they're smart. They're trying to automate some software and instead of buying software to do it for them, they wanted to Vibe code their own because they had some like bespoke need or they wanted it done a certain way, you know. And I really thought a lot about how can I arm the Vibe coders to help automate their work online. And director is that a director is an agent builder. So using natural language, you don't have to know how to code. You can say, hey, I want you to go to the California nursing website, look up Julia hu, nursing number 94156, and tell me that she has her nursing license. That's my wife. And you know, it will build you that workflow to actually go out to the website, put in the information in the form, verify this credential check. It's a common thing in medicine to check the credential and then give you a script that you can then integrate into your application. And what's quite cool is that it helps people build these PoCs where it's like, well, can AI automate that for me? Well, you can try it with director and chat to build this automation script. And then when it works well, you can hand it off to an engineer and say, hey, can you make this ready for production or can you integrate this into our application? So we view this as kind of like it's like the V0 for browser automation or the lovable or the bolt new for browser automation. And we're really trying to arm the Vibe coders with better tools because we think that this is a better experience than just dropping our docs into cloud code or something like that.

Who knew dentists were Vibe coders?

Dentists are vibe coders. There's so many Vibe coders. I mean one of our customers is a 55 year old dairy hauling company. They never hired an engineer in their entire life.

How did they find you?

Well, they hired their first engineer this year and that engineer used browser base to automate the aggregation of gas prices along a route. Previously they had an ops person saying, okay, you're doing this route, here's where you stop for gas. They built like a AI assistant that would go, given the route, find the gas prices and tell you you know what, where you should go for gas. And that was all Vibe coded by this engineer using browser base. So I think it kind of has shown that AI has escaped Silicon Valley. We are people are building agents in the middle of the United States, they're building it internationally. So it's not just our SF bubble anymore. And we think that the primitives here are really well advantaged to help power Vibe coders. Because when you're a vibe coder, you're just pulling together a bunch of primitives and trying to build your bespoke Apple application. So we want to really double down on those people. And the director, director AI product is going to be the thing we do to give them better tools.

It's hit the farms. And the dentist.

And the dentists, exactly.

Wow, you've hit velocity. I don't know where you go after that. Yeah, truly.

To the moon.

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Yeah, for browser base, we've really invested a lot into our customer engineering team and they're not traditional like CS people that you might find on the street. Like they're actually the most educated people at browserbase. Like one went to Columbia, other went to Harvard. So like pretty smart people on our team and they're all engineers. So like we think that when you are a developer and you're trying to get support for an application you're building, you want to talk to another engineer. And that's why we've built this customer engineering team that you can hop on a call with them, you can book office hours with them when you're trying to build your application. Our KPI is how soon can you get to production? How soon can you ship this thing? And we spend a lot of time on making that easy as well as like, you know, we try and make the product very self service. So for our customers, they don't have to talk to us, but if they want to, if they want advice, we're here to help them. And it's a team that I'm very proud of because they do a lot of the heavy lifting to make, you know, when our product isn't doing a great job, which there are many parts of our product, I want to keep making better. The customer engineering team really helps smooth over the rough edges because they can kind of be there with the workaround or be there with the best practice or help you avoid the landmines before you step on them.

So what is your team composition? I've heard you have a great culture, a really great team. You guys are based in San Francisco, but what's the Current composition?

Yeah, we're about, you know, I think 2/3 engineering, 1 third go to market. So, you know, we're an infrastructure company, so majority engineers within those engineering teams, we have like five sub teams. And then on the go to market side, we have just one big blob of go to market people. And they all like have very clear responsibilities. Like, you know, we have a sales function, we have a growth function, we have a customer support function, marketing function within growth. But we've tried to keep things very flat. And I think that really we've tried to invest a lot in this in person culture in San Francisco. We have an office in San Francisco. The team is in person five days a week. But it's like we balance that intensity where it's like, hey, we people kind of show up between like 9 or 10am they leave around like 6 or 7pm and you know, if you step out to go to the dentist, it's like no big deal. It's not like we're building a, like prison or something, right? Like, we're just trying to go back to what we had before COVID which was like high trust, high integrity default is coming into the office. And we built this culture that I call. We call ourselves an emotionally vulnerable company. So we really anchor on, hey, how can we talk about the hard things? How can we talk about the feelings we have about the work we're doing? Because if you don't express that, you end up building a lot of resentment. And like a few of our values is like, assume best intent, dare to trust. Like, you just met this person, are you going to trust them, like with their opinions? Well, you should, like, that's the first thing. Assume best intent, dare to trust, embrace our mistakes. We did something in all hands recently where we all went around and said like, hey, what's one thing we messed up on recently to try and normalize that. And what engineer was like, hey, like, I tripped this bug that broke production. And it made me really question, like, am I a good engineer? And immediately we were all able to say, no, you're a fantastic engineer. What are you thinking? But like, just being able to find those like little insecurities and validate them and then also like push people to continue to take risks and we are going to ship bugs. That's okay. It's part of the journey. But the more that we can be aware of how we're feeling about the work we're doing, the better we can work together as a team in person. So people really like our culture we have a great video about our culture on our website on the careers page that really kind of, like, to me speaks to what it feels like to work at browser base. And the most important value is pressure as a privilege. And I got that from the US Open, where, like, you walk on the US and it's out there. And I love that because we were a team of former founders. I'm a former founder of a company that didn't find product market fit. And it's important to remember, like, when you feel customer pressure, when you feel pressure from investors or from the world, that means you're doing something right. That means that you have the opportunity to build something and people are depending on it. And I really like to try and reframe that. Like, when we feel stressed out and pressure, like, oh, my gosh, that means something is working, and we shouldn't be taking that for granted.

Bucky did mention in our notes that the ownership mindset is, like, a critical value of the company. But how did you actually come to that? And why do you think that's so critical?

Yeah, well, I think that's the only way you can scale well. Like, you can't. You can hire a bunch of, like, midline managers to micromanage each team and, like, make sure things are on the right path. Or you can empower people and say, like, hey, if you build something, you need to see it through and make sure people use it. Like, you don't just throw it over the fence to the growth team and, like, hope it gets used. Like, I always try and get the engineering team to question, like, okay, I ship this thing. Are people using it? If not, should I be tweeting about it? Should I be helping grow it? Should I be going to the Slack channel telling our customers about that? There shouldn't be these artificial divides between, like, building and growing. I actually think that the growth team is here to help champion our engineers when they build things. But we also have no PMs, and that's by design. Like, the engineers drive the product requirements from the customer needs. And I think that gets a lot easier. We have more customers because there's clearly a lot of needs. So you can just pick something off there, spend time with the customer, build the thing that works for them, and then own the outcome of, like, well, how do I get more people to use this? Do I write a blog post? Do I make a video? And using our growth resources to make that as seamless as possible.

How do you filter for that in recruiting, though? And you're Hiring people, like, how much of this is training versus just natural expertise?

Yeah, I wish I had like a tweet that I could say that would like capture that. I think it's a lot of vibes. I think it's like you can pattern match really well. Like, I've hired 25 people in person in San Francisco. We've had people move across the country to come work at Browserbase and it kind of comes down to a few things. It comes down to like, are they a missionary? Like I really. We're still in the missionary phase at Browserbase where like every person who works here deeply cares about the mission. They all have built something before joining the company with Browserbase and they say like, this is why it makes sense to me. So they're bought in on this thing and they want to be contributing to it. I also think that a lot of former founders really enjoy working at Browserbase. We have Quite a few XYZ CTOs or former CEOs of smaller companies that have come to Browser Base and those people tend to get it. They're also just great people to work with because they know the pressure I'm under as a solo founder and they're a great support network for me within the company. So throughout it all the way we find great people is really having great people come to us and making sure with clear messaging, like I said earlier, the right people tend to self select into Browser base. And the more we can share our culture externally, we end up attracting the right people. And through, you know, a series of many conversations, we're able to figure out their intentions and their attitude are aligned to what we need to build a great company.

How are you thinking about growing the team?

With this new funding, we're going to double the team. So we're going to 50 this year. We've had. I haven't had a desk at browser based since I started the company.

What?

Yeah, I think I have one for like a month and then I had.

To go standing around walking.

Yeah, I just feel like it calls and like I was like squat at people's desks. But we've moved like four or five offices now I think. So we're moving to again twice this year to expand. But throughout all that, like it's just we want to grow the team, we want to grow engineering, we want to grow our sales motion a little bit more. I think a lot of infrastructure companies and dev tool companies are allergic to sales. It's like engineers don't like to sell. Both my parents were salespeople so I'm what happens when you get like a gamer raised by salespeople who loves to code. Right. So I think for us, we need to be best in class at sales. And sales is a really important tool for helping people understand how do they fit this into their product and how do we think about helping you shape your roadmap over the next six years? Or, sorry, six months. So really doubling down across all of the business. And I think 50 is going to be a really awesome size. I think we've historically underhired browser base, so I'm excited to kind of bring more people into the fold. We actually hired five people this last month.

Congrats.

Thank you.

Wow, that's great. That's big. And we didn't even talk about this yet, but let's get into your background.

Oh, please.

So you've mentioned a couple times your solo founder. What? Okay, yes, you mentioned that, but also I just remembered I was listening to a pod with Turner Novak and he said that you said founding a startup should be last resort. So. Wow. Can you like bring that into the whole picture here?

Absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of founders start companies for the wrong reasons. And I was one of those founders. I remember it very clearly. I was at Twilio for three years from intern IPO and then stayed to lead a team. And I'll never forget the day I knew I had to quit. I just had this big architecture decision and my tech lead had given me a bunch of comments on it. I was like this guy. I disagreed and I went home and I coincidentally got a text from my future co founder of my first company, Lance. And he said, hey, like, do you want me hack on this thing this weekend? I was like, let's do it. And we built this really awesome product called Stream Club. And the reason I started that company was because I liked building. I liked the idea of starting a company. I wanted to see what I was capable of. But I wasn't like, I didn't have any like, differentiated attitude towards the live streaming market back then and nor did any of us really. But we were at the right place, right time and had the right team to go try and build a great company. And I think that people who start companies because they want to see what it's like, it can be very challenging because you don't have that like raw emotional connection to what you're building that will push you through all the hard times. You'll see what it's like. It's really hard. You know, you Building a company is very painful and you lose your hair and you don't work out as much and your life is not the same, you don't see as your friends as much. So I think that with after we exited Stream Club and we were able to go work at Mux, which is a video infra company, really great company, I took a lot of time to reflect on why should you start a company? And to me, you should start a company when nobody else is building the thing that you need. And with Stream Club, I spent a lot of time on browser automation or this idea of the headless browser, which is what browser offers. It's a browser running on a server and I spent so much time on this stack and I became very opinionated about it. It's one of the reasons why we sold Stream Club to Mux was for headless browser technology. And that really helped me develop a point of view on this infrastructure and why it was important. And maybe a year or so later, this rise of AI and AI agents, I kept getting calls like, hey, how do we use this headless browser stuff? You're super familiar with it, like you know a lot about it. And I just gave them a lot of feedback. I said, oh, well, I'm sorry guys, like most of the infrastructure here kind of sucks, so you're gonna go build it yourself. And here's my tips. And BY like the 20th conversation, it became very clear that no one was building the infrastructure to help these people automate the web. And that needed to be me. But I also was like very hesitant to start a company. I felt like to start a company you have to be willing to commit several years of your life to building something great and also be able to sacrifice quite a bit. There's a lot of opportunity costs these days if you're like a well, well talented person. So it was like kind of a last resort thing where it's like, no one's going to build this thing. I know how to do it and I'm probably the best person out there to go build this company. I should do that company, I should start that. And that's really what was the driving force for Browser Base.

And you're a solo founder. That's a lot of stress. Startups are a lot of stress. We're really fortunate to be sponsored by Brex and Brex really is the best partner for startups. And I'm not just saying that, but they also really stress on performance. And so how do you keep your mindset clear while you're building While you're running and doing these really hard sprints and loops.

Yeah, well, I'm not a solo founder by choice necessarily. I tried to get like three people to be my co founder and they also know. So like, I, I think in the end that worked out for the better. And I do really love being a solo founder specifically because as a solo founder, you remove this alignment step within co founders where you have. We have several co founders. Often the co founders have to get aligned and then you get aligned to the rest of the company. So when you're a solo founder, it's just you and the company in constant harmony. And if I feel like the company is not moving in alignment to me, I could have an all hands meeting and we kind of realign in our all hands meetings. Kind of feel like megachurch vibes these days. You know, it's a lot of like talking about the values and talking about the customer stories and I think that really helps us stay in tune as a culture. In terms of taking care of myself, the most important thing is like finding a great partner. And I'm very lucky that I just got married this year, so I'm still in the honeymoon phase.

Congrats again.

Yes, thank you. So, like, I think as a solo founder, you have to have a person that's going to be there for you in the rest of your life and all the other things you have going on. I used to be super fit. I did an Ironman. I've run three marathons. That has gone out the window. I've never seen a series. I found it with the six pack, so I think it's something you have to sacrifice, you know, and I, I try and like do my best to, you know, get to the gym where I can, but in the end, my goal with the first year of browser was to be obsessed. Like, I want to be obsessed with the problem and sacrifice everything else to make this thing happen. And I think you have to make a lot of sacrifices to make that work. But if it starts working, the momentum is what fuels you to keep going and post series B. Definitely trying to hire a little bit more, get a little more time back so I can maybe start to like eat a salad every once in a while and go for a run.

Good.

Working on it.

You know, get a protein shake.

Yeah. Get a David Barr, right?

Yeah, you could, you could. I think David Barr uses Brex.

Oh, there we go.

So there we go. Double collab.

Boom.

I also, I can't help but notice Paul Klein. You are the fourth Paul Klein. Tell us about Paul Klein.

Yeah, there's all of them. Well, you can think about Paul Klein, Dua Lipa's ex, the singer actually, of Lanny. Or you think of Paul Klein, Ohio family. And my grandfather is someone I really look up to. He started out as, like, going through school, night school, and grew to be this kind of, like, business executive working for a company called National Cash Register and then doing some turnaround exec stuff later on. And I think we have it on easy mode these days, starting businesses. I can go raise capital. I can go hire people. I can use the Internet. I think it was so much harder to build great businesses in, like, the 80s and 90s. And whenever I sent him my investor update, the guy has a very high bar. Recently I invited him to our series B party happening tonight, and he was like, hey, this is great. I appreciate it. I'd rather only come to an IPO party. So let me know when that happens and I'll come on by. I was like, oh, crap. Okay, we better hustle up. But I think that's just a great attitude of, like, you know, the bar for companies is it's much easier these days. And when you meet people who've been in the industry. And I think actually our board, Glenn Solomon, is someone who really has a lot of industry experience. Those are the people that can really help you connect with. Like, look at all the stuff you have to overcome in the future and don't take it for granted that you can go raise capital and you have Brex to help you do your finances right. Like, the tool stack for modern founders is much simpler now, which means I get to spend more time on product and customers and hiring than all the other admin stuff I may have had to do 20 years ago.

As we wrap up, I love to go through two extra segments on future outlooks. So I'd love to know, what are you most looking forward to this year?

What I'm most looking forward to this year, I am really looking forward to the things I can't predict. Honestly, there's so much that's gonna surprise me. I think there's gonna be new model releases. I think there's gonna be new companies that break out. Who's going to beat Cursor on the path to 100 million of ARR? I think there is so much surprise that happens in our industry, and I love that surprise. I love waking up to a big release. It's like, oh, wow, this is so exciting. So continuing to see the innovation is going to be pretty Fun. And I don't know what's going to come, but I know it's going to be really cool and it's going to push our technology forward quite a bit.

Love that. Our final segment is with Kalshi. So we'll bring in a Kalshi market or two and these will be on the theme of like, you know, AI and software and infrastructure and anything that we can pull. But with AI agents, I want to go back to like I know. By the way, Browser Base is not an AI agent company, it's infrastructure. But of the theme. So jobs are like one of the hottest topics and whether or not people are going to have their jobs replaced, maybe Browser Base ends up taking over some people's jobs, I don't know. But how high do you think unemployment will get this year?

Well, first of all, I think it's not going to replace. It'll augment. I think there's still going to need to be humans in loop supervising and if anything, I hope that the work that Browse does helps give people more leverage in the work they do. Instead of you doing the boring work, automate the boring work, do the exciting work and spend more time doing the boring work faster. So I don't think it's going to replace all the jobs. The question is how high will employment get, unemployment get? I know people have been saying some pretty crazy stats. I'm going to say a baseline 9%. I don't know where we're at right now. I think we're probably in the eights.

Nine is pretty high.

I don't know what the baseline of employment is right now. Can I pull over and look at this?

On CalSHI, it has a forecast of 8.7. So you're pretty close. You're pretty close. Majority is shooting for above 5%, which is kind of a cop out because it's pretty easy.

I saw a stat yesterday at the red point infrared 100 summit, which we are.

Oh, how was that?

It was really fun. And apparently, and this is such a bummer because I'm a CS major, but new grad CS majors have a larger unemployment rate than art history majors.

Really?

20, 25? Yeah.

Who would have known?

Art history making a comeback, by the way.

I went to college for art.

So this is your revenge?

I pivoted quite fast to be fair. But the artists are coming to get artists.

You should learn to art.

You should learn to art. For sure.

I mean, seeing that I would, I'd say like, yeah, you want, you want high ROI on your, your Gamble. Right. So I'd go nine. Let's see what happens.

For sure. I agree. I like to play the risky game. Okay, this one is, like, kind of spicy, but especially in sf. What do you think the best AI will be this month?

I think it's Gemini. I think the DeepMind lab has been doing a really fantastic job. I think it's really tough because I always see These stats of DeepMind engineers leaving to go to other places, but the team really did a great job. We have early access to the Gemini computer use model at browser base, and it's very, very good. I'm excited for the larger release of it in the future, but the Gemini team has really been doing a great job. So I'm going to bet on Gemini all day long. I don't care what the odds are. I'm doubling down. We just raised 40 million bucks. Put it all on Gemini.

All on Gemini. You're not alone. Most of the CTOs and, like, engineers and more technical people that I talk to all are hot on Gemini for sure.

Yeah.

This one's a curveball. Are you ready for this?

I'm ready.

Will a major meteor strike Earth before 2030?

Define what's defined major.

10 kilotons or TNT equivalent or greater.

That seems kind of big.

Sounds big.

I'm go. No, I'm gonna say no way, though I'm sure there's some data and there's some, like, space nerds that are saying, actually, we will have one. But my uninformed hope domestic opinion is, no, we won't be struck by a meteor by 2030. Okay. What's the world saying?

There's a 65 chance.

Oh, geez. We'll get to AGI and then immediately go back to the caveman days when we get hit by a meteor.

That's a really high chance.

Yeah, well, you know, maybe we, our AGI, will be able to dodge the meteors.

I would hope the AI can turn or deflect the meteor away from the Earth.

It sounds possible. Maybe if we all just yell at the meteor loud enough like it'll spin around.

We should deploy some browser base to hit the meteor.

Deploy some browser base? Yeah. The web browsers will collectively will maybe, like, make a DDOS attack and point it at the meteor. Yeah. You know what? If I have to, we'll raise the Series F and we'll ride the rocket out there and we'll face the meteor ourselves.

Please, we're all hoping, waiting, counting on you.

Do my best. Okay.

Paul, it was amazing to have you on. Congrats again on the Series B. Yeah, I'm so excited for you and this was so fun.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Series B. Let's celebrate.

Hey it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter Sorcery vc where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines. Email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery Today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen. Link in Description to sign up.