Lightpanda raises pre-seed
to develop the first browser built for machines and AI

We’re excited to share that Lightpanda has raised a pre-seed round to build the first browser designed from the ground up for machines. The round is led by ISAI, with participation from a group of exceptional angel investors including the founders of Mistral, Hugging Face and Dust.

Why now?

Modern AI systems are beginning to rely on the web in new ways. Whether for LLM training, agentic workflows, or structured data extraction, the browser is increasingly used as an interface between AI and the real world. But today’s web browsers were never designed for this shift.

Even “headless” browsers inherit the structure and overhead of visual browsers. They’re built on rendering engines optimized for human interaction and visual accuracy, not for speed, efficiency, or automation. The result is fragile, bloated infrastructure with high resource costs, limited control, and no native support for the programmatic interactions modern AI systems require.

Lightpanda takes a different approach

We’re building an open source browser from first principles, assuming the user is a machine, not a human.

Lightpanda removes the graphical composition entirely. It launches in milliseconds, uses a fraction of the memory, and integrates directly with the Chrome DevTools Protocol for compatibility with libraries like Playwright and Puppeteer.

By owning the full web automation stack, we can go beyond performance, enabling features like native remote control, structured outputs tailored for LLMs, and deeper integration with AI agents.

The road ahead

Now backed by investors who understand the infrastructure demands emerging at the intersection of AI and the web, we’re accelerating development.

With this funding, we’ll grow our engineering team, expand browser coverage, and begin shipping features designed specifically for AI workflows.

“The current stack wasn’t built for what’s coming. Automation is no longer a niche use case, it’s becoming the primary driver of web traffic. That shift challenges our core assumptions and demands a new paradigm for how AI systems interact with the web.” — Francis Bouvier, co-founder and CEO of Lightpanda

Investors

In addition to ISAI  (Jean-Patrice Anciaux ), Kima  (Alexis Robert ), Factorial Capital  (Matt Hartman ) and Prototype Capital  (Andreas Klinger ), we’re proud to be supported by an impressive lineup of private investors, including:

• Arthur Mensch  (Mistral)
• Julien Chaumond  and Thomas Wolf  (Hugging Face)
• Stanislas Polu  and Gabriel Hubert  (Dust)
• Mehdi Ghissassi  (ex-Google Deepmind)
• Matthieu Rouif  (Photoroom)
• Benjamin Fabre  (Datadome)
• Sébastien Chopin , Kevin Cohen , Luc Delsalle , Thibaud Elzière , Arnaud Ferreri , Yann Fleureau , Anis Gandoura , Emmanuel Gras, Jérôme Joaug , Quentin Nickmans , Amaury Sepulchre , Nicolas Steegmann , Roxanne Varza 

Get in touch

If you are working on web-based agents, extracting web data at scale, or designing systems that require reliable machine interaction with the web, please reach out.

You can try the browser via our GitHub .