A new wave of AI browsers is emerging with the promise of helping users complete daily tasks more efficiently. These include Perplexity’s Comet, Opera’s Neon, and The Browser Company’s Dia. While these are agents limited to one specific browser, a startup called Composite is building an agentic solution designed to help professionals with their tasks regardless of which browser they prefer to use.
The startup was founded earlier this year by Yang Fan Yun and Charlie Deane. Yun is a former product manager at Uber, and Deane previously founded a company that sold server proxies. During his time at Uber, Yun observed that many of his colleagues were spending time on repetitive grunt work within their browsers. He noted that people in various roles, including marketing, sales, recruitment, and security engineering, performed a lot of tedious work. He felt this prevented them from using their full education and skills, which inspired him to find a way to easily automate this type of work. This observation became the core problem statement for Composite.
The company recently announced it has raised five point six million dollars in a seed funding round. The round was led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross’s venture firm, with participation from Menlo Ventures and Anthropic’s Anthology Fund.
Composite currently offers its solution for Mac computers. The setup process is very straightforward, requiring users only to install a browser extension to enable the agents to operate within that browser. Users can issue different commands across the web tools they use, and Composite will complete the work. For example, it can help a user go through a Jira backlog of bugs using relevant documents, leave comments on high-priority bugs, and mark duplicate bugs as resolved.
The startup states that security engineers can use it to look up candidates across various sites and draft personalized emails. Security engineers can also create vulnerability tickets based on alerts, and marketers can pull reports from different sources to create short insights reports.
Yun said that other AI browsers and agents from companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are focused on solving non-professional needs, such as helping with shopping and booking tickets. He explained that Composite is an ideal tool for professionals who want to set up their workflows without needing technical knowledge. The tool is very good at atomic actions like clicking on different elements of a website or typing in boxes, which effectively gets the job done for users.
He added that because the agents operate within browsers where users are already logged into services, Composite does not require special connectors and can work across different websites. The tool already suggests some tasks based on user patterns. In the coming months, the company aims to develop a better mechanism to automatically surface tasks that Composite can perform on the user’s behalf. The startup is also working on a way to schedule tasks for recurring use.
The startup argues that its tool is better suited for professionals because it does not require users to switch browsers. It also allows administrators to restrict tools, executes tasks locally, and lets users define which websites are out of bounds for the agent.
Competition in the area of AI agents for professionals is significant. Companies like OpenAI use their own browser to take actions, while Notion relies on user context within its app combined with other connectors. Another company, backed by General Catalyst, aims to use your entire desktop as context. A number of other startups are working on agents with a narrower focus, such as within a spreadsheet. Many of these startups are in early stages, and there are questions about the long-term efficiency of AI agents. While investors are ready to fund these ventures, the startups will have a lot to prove to justify the investments.
A partner at Menlo Ventures expressed confidence in Composite’s ability to stand out. He said the tool was very intuitive for professionals to use without being overly technical. He stated that Composite handles different modalities and sites very well and is designed with professional use cases in mind. The tool is well-suited for people who have to go through many tasks in a day across a range of functions.