As we round off 2023, it's time to pause and reflect on a journey marked by innovation, resilience, and collective growth. In this year-end recap, we're excited to share the milestones we've reached and the exciting path that lies ahead. Join us as we revisit the moments that defined 2023, and set our sights on a future filled with endless possibilities.
We Grew Our Team
At the beginning of the year, Browse AI had 10 employees (this was up from 5 at the beginning of 2022). As of the writing of this sentence, our team is 27 strong! This includes folks who've previously worked for Facebook, Amazon, Quora, Zapier, and other notable companies.
The hiring breakdown:
Engineering: 7
Customer Success: 4
Sales: 2
Marketing: 2
Product: 1
Operations: 1
Our next hires: We're currently looking for a Senior Product Designer and Senior Product Engineers (backend and full-stack).
From fully remote to hybrid
In September, we secured an office space in downtown Vancouver, where our local team members can get together and collaborate. The convenience of working remotely but also the opportunity for in-person — the best of both worlds!
We Became Profitable
Many of your favorite startups have yet to become profitable. It's the reality of trying to build an innovative technology that not only solves a problem, but that people are willing to pay for.
Browse AI launched back in September of 2021, and we've been moving towards our mission to empower and enable individuals and small businesses to better access valuable web data. In April of 2023, we became profitable! From a user base of 20,000 in 2022 which grew to 330,000 strong in 2023 (including individuals and teams from 50 Fortune 500 companies), all of our progress and accomplishments until fairly recently were achieved with $400,000 in pre-seed funding from Zapier and a few other investors. Which brings us to...
We Got Funding
We secured $2.8 million in seed funding. While we were approached by a number of investors, we decided to raise $2.8 million from a select group who are mostly former founders, including the co-founders of Dropbox, DoorDash, and Blinkist. It was a careful choice because we wanted to partner with those who not only aligned with our values but also believed in our mission and vision.
We Improved the Product
We came together as a team this year and delivered some amazing improvements to Browse AI. Here are some of the highlights:
- We introduced Workflows, enabling users to effortlessly chain robots together for sequential execution and deep scraping automations.
- Unveiled Robot Studio (beta), a brand new way to train robots in any desktop browser without the need for downloading browser extensions.
- Launched Team accounts, enabling collaboration in teams with 100s and thousands of users.
- We introduced a brand new annual Starter plan, offering 10,000 credits for a year upfront for just $19 per month (billed annually).
- Enabled the extraction of lists at 10x less cost (10 list items consuming 1 credit, instead of the previous 10).
- Added the ability to filter the data that gets synced with Google Sheets to avoid adding duplicate data when monitoring over time.
- Added the ability to bulk transfer or delete robots.
- Published dozens of new prebuilt robots, enabling users to hit the ground running with a few clicks!
- Improved robot scalability, including the ability to run hundreds of thousands of tasks concurrently.
- Delivered an improved Airtable integration, allowing for a faster, more reliable, and user-friendly experience.
- Added a new account usage history page so that users can see how many credits they have spent on each robot over time.
What's Next:
We've been working on Browse AI 2.0. We'll keep a lot of what makes Browse AI great, but after poring over tens of thousands of feature requests from our users we have a better understanding of what we need to focus on. People love robots and AI, but they are more productive when they can just play with a spreadsheet and don’t have to worry about how the data is extracted – getting accurate data at scale with as little fuss as possible.
In 2.0, we'll still have robots, AI, and personalized machine learning. But it will be in the background doing the work, while the end-user experience is primarily focused on the data. In other words, we want to take your easiest no-code web scraping software and make it even easier!
We Won an Award
We were a Top 3 finalist in the 23rd annual New Ventures BC Competition, presented by Innovate BC. It was an honor to have a panel of judges deem Browse AI to be one of the highest potential technology companies in Western Canada.
We're Getting the Word Out
Our marketing team has been producing blog posts, revamping YouTube videos (as well as some new ones), engaging on Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as exploring Instagram. All this in an effort to inform our users (and those who haven't yet heard of us) about web scraping and why they should use Browse AI.
We're Supporting Our Users
Our Customer Success team crushed it! Across almost 5,000 conversations, 90% were rated as Great by users. They cut the time to first response in half towards the second half of this year. With a small but mighty team, we're making sure that our users are getting the support they need. That also means improving self-serve resources like our Help Center and video tutorials.
We Thank You!
Finally, we couldn’t have done any of this without you, our amazing community. We’re hopeful that 2024 will be an even more momentous and successful year for Browse AI and our users as we continue to make web scraping accessible. We’re just getting started.
