The first wave of AI browsers mostly failed because they were built for the wrong people. Kevin Jiang, who worked on Perplexity’s Comet browser before leaving to start his own company, has a clear read on why: consumers don’t book flights every day. According to TechCrunch, Jiang’s new startup, Polar, has now raised a $5.7 million seed round led by Madrona to build something different: an AI browser aimed specifically at knowledge workers.
The timing is worth understanding. In 2025, the AI browser space was crowded and loud. OpenAI had Atlas. The Browser Company had Dia before selling to Atlassian. Firefox added AI features and then got criticized for it. Most of these products tried to replace default search or let users chat with their tabs. Jiang’s argument is that none of that was ever compelling enough to change someone’s daily habits, because the tasks being targeted weren’t frequent enough to matter.
Polar takes a different approach. Instead of chasing mass-market behavior, it targets professionals in sales, recruitment, marketing, research, and business operations, people who spend most of their working hours inside a browser and run repetitive tasks constantly. With Polar, users can schedule workflows, save prompts, and assign tasks to agents based on their open tabs. The company says non-technical users can run it without any setup complexity.
The browser is free, with a limited number of daily AI credits included. Paid plans start at $20 per month for higher usage. Interestingly, Polar says most current users run it alongside another browser, treating it as a dedicated automation tool rather than a full daily driver. The startup isn’t bothered by that. Its goal is to be the best place to automate browser-based work, and it’s open to expanding into areas like computer use down the road.
The investor perspective matters here. Sabrina Albert, a partner at Madrona, pointed out that building reliable agentic work on the open web is genuinely hard, and that a browser has structural advantages: it sees exactly how users interact with sites, and users are already logged in to the services they use most. That login access is a real technical edge for running agents that need to act on someone’s behalf.
The round also included ex-GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Phia founder Phoebe Gates, Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson, and several other founders. The backer list skews technical and operator-heavy, which fits the product’s positioning.
The broader shift in this space is real. Startups like Browser Use, Strawberry, and Aside are all building with an agentic angle now. Perplexity’s Comet has moved in that direction too. But most are still general-purpose. Polar’s bet is that going narrow, specifically knowledge work, gives it a cleaner path to actual retention. That logic is sound. The question is whether it can build enough reliability into the agent layer to make professionals trust it with real workflows.
