Browserbase

Running a real browser inside an AI agent turns out to be its own engineering problem. You need to manage browser fingerprints, rotate proxies to avoid blocks, solve CAPTCHAs, handle crashes, store authentication state across sessions, and run potentially thousands of concurrent sessions. Browserbase sells this as a service: spin up an isolated Chrome session on demand, get a WebSocket connection, and drive it with Playwright or Puppeteer (standard browser automation libraries). Your agent code does not change significantly; you just point it at Browserbase instead of a local browser.

Browserbase also maintains Stagehand, an open-source framework that sits on top of Playwright and lets AI agents drive browsers with natural language instructions rather than precise CSS selectors. The combination of Stagehand for agent logic and Browserbase for infrastructure has become a common pattern for teams building browser-using agents in production. Each session is recorded as a replayable video and DOM timeline, which is useful for debugging when an agent fails 47 steps into a workflow.

By early 2026, Browserbase had raised $68 million and expanded aggressively beyond its core headless browser product, adding a Fetch API, a Search API, and a Functions layer. Most major agent frameworks integrate with it directly. It sits in the agent infrastructure layer alongside tools like E2B (which does the same for code execution sandboxes), and is increasingly a standard piece of the stack for teams shipping production web agents.