Polar raises $5.7M for an AI browser built for knowledge work

Polar, a startup building an AI-first browser aimed at knowledge workers, has raised $5.7 million in a seed round led by Madrona. The company is led by CEO Kevin Jiang, who previously worked at Perplexity on its Comet browser.

The funding arrives after a wave of AI-browser launches in 2025, when companies large and small tried to build browsers that baked in AI in an effort to own the interface people use to browse the internet. Since then, several of those bets have unwound: OpenAI’s Atlas is now history, The Browser Company sold to Atlassian and shifted its Dia browser toward productivity use cases, and Firefox tried to strike a balance in its AI efforts by offering an off-switch — and got criticized anyway. This year, the focus has shifted to agents and automation, with startups such as Strawberry, Browser Use, and Aside building browsers with an agentic slant, and even Perplexity’s own Comet moving toward browser agents.

Jiang said the first wave of AI browsers aimed to change users’ default search habits and have them chat with open tabs to handle tasks like travel booking — a proposition he argues never found a strong pull with everyday consumers. “If you think about end-user consumers, they don’t book a flight or make a reservation every day or every week. There wasn’t a strong pull for mass consumers to go to an AI browser and find value in it,” he said. Polar instead targets knowledge work — sales, recruitment, marketing, research, and business operations — letting users schedule workflows, save prompts, and assign tasks to agents based on their open tabs. The company says the browser can be used easily by non-technical people.

The browser itself is free, with a few daily credits for AI tasks; subscription plans for higher credit limits start at $20 per month. Polar says most of its current users still rely on another browser as their daily driver and use Polar mainly to automate tasks, though the startup’s goal is to become the default tool for that automation — and it remains open to exploring other approaches, such as computer use, to get there. Madrona partner Sabrina Albert said automating tasks for knowledge workers is a huge market, and that building a browser gives a company an advantage in understanding how users interact with websites, since users are already logged into the services they rely on most. The round also drew Thomas Dohmke, Phoebe Gates, Erik Bernhardsson, Benjamin Spector, Rob Wachen, and Robert Yang.

Why it matters

Polar is betting that AI browsers gain traction not by replacing consumer search, but as workplace-automation tools for a narrower, professional audience — a bet that sidesteps the exact use case that has already tripped up several 2025 entrants.