Perplexity employee who worked on Comet launches an AI browser aimed at knowledge work

AI browsers were each the rage successful 2025. Companies ample and tiny tried to physique browsers that baked successful AI successful an effort to ain the interface radical usage to browse the internet.

How the turns person tabled. Today, OpenAI’s Atlas is history, and The Browser Company sold to Atlassian, with its Dia browser present focusing connected productivity usage cases. Firefox tried to onslaught a equilibrium successful its ain AI efforts by providing an off-switch, but it got shouted at anyway.

This year, the absorption has shifted to agents and automation. Startups similar Strawberry, Browser Use, and Aside are gathering browsers with an agentic slant, and adjacent Perplexity’s Comet has moved towards providing browser agents.

Amid this change, a startup called Polar has travel retired with an AI-first browser aimed astatine cognition workers, and it has present raised a $5.7 cardinal effect circular led by Madrona.

CEO, Kevin Jiang, who antecedently worked astatine Perplexity connected Comet, said the archetypal question of AI browsers aimed to alteration default hunt for users and person them chat with tabs for doing tasks similar question booking, which wasn’t a beardown semipermanent proposition.

“If you deliberation astir end-user consumers, they don’t publication a formation oregon marque a preservation each time oregon each week. There wasn’t a beardown propulsion for wide consumers to spell to an AI browser and find worth successful it. That’s wherefore our AI browser is not focused astatine each connected wide consumers. We’re focused connected wherever we deliberation browser agents are really valuable, which is cognition work,” Jiang told TechCrunch.

With Polar, users tin docket workflows, prevention prompts and delegate tasks to agents based connected their unfastened tabs. The institution says the browser tin beryllium easy utilized by non-technical users, and tin assistance with enactment similar sales, recruitment, marketing, probe and concern operations.

The browser itself is escaped to use, and you get a fewer regular credits to walk connected AI tasks. Users that privation higher recognition limits tin wage for subscription plans starting from $20 per month.

Polar says astir of its existent idiosyncratic basal conscionable uses its browser for automating tasks portion utilizing different browser arsenic their regular driver. The startup’s extremity is to go a instrumentality for automation, and it believes that the browser is presently the champion mode to bash it. Still, it is unfastened to exploring different avenues, specified arsenic machine use.

Sabrina Albert, a spouse astatine Madrona, said automating tasks for cognition workers is simply a immense market.

“I deliberation that the hard portion is gathering truly reliable agentic enactment connected the open, logged-in web. Building a web browser has a full acceptable of antithetic advantages of knowing however users interact and prosecute with websites. Plus, they are logged into astir of these websites, giving the instrumentality entree to services they usage the most,” she said implicit a call.

The circular besides saw information from ex-GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Phia laminitis Phoebe Gates, Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson, Flapping Airplanes co-founder Benjamin Spector, Etched co-founder Rob Wachen, and Fundamental Research Labs co-founder and CEO Robert Yang.