Polar Raised $5.7M After a Customer Fired Clay

Aug 01, 2026

Kevin Jiang spent a year helping Perplexity build Comet, one of the first AI browsers people actually used day to day. Then he left to build a browser that competes with it. Seven months later, without a single investor meeting, Polar had taken 4.5 million actions across the open web on behalf of its users. One company saved more than 25 hours per person per week and cancelled its Clay subscription because of it. Only after that did Polar raise anything: a $5.7 million seed round led by Madrona, with GitHub’s former CEO and Modal’s CEO writing personal checks.

Polar’s three founders all came out of MIT. Kevin Jiang, CEO, spent a stretch at Perplexity working on Comet. Vishaal Ram, the technical co-founder, did distributed-systems research at MIT’s PDOS lab and worked at Modal, DRW, and Nectar. Howard Zhong traded at Jane Street, wrote software at Apple, researched at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and MIT CSAIL, and co-founded ProSights (YC W24) before joining Polar.

The product isn’t pitched as a general-purpose browser. It’s built for parts of a workday that don’t require judgment — opening 30 tabs to answer one question, filling out the same form 40 times, updating the same spreadsheet after every call. Polar logs in as the user, clicks and types the way they would, and runs those tasks end to end, for minutes or for hours, unsupervised — the company says it has completed tasks for more than 15 hours without intervention. The company operates legally as Recursive Intelligence, Inc., out of San Francisco.

Polar raised $5.7 million in a seed round led by Madrona, whose partner Sabrina Albert wrote the check personally. Her rationale: “Engineers got a transformative moment from tools like Claude Code, and most knowledge workers are still waiting for theirs. Their work lives in the browser, and Kevin, Vishaal, and Howard built the first agent that can operate there.” Angel syndicate includes Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO), Erik Bernhardsson (CEO of Modal), Phoebe Gates (Phia), Rob Wachen (Etched), Benjamin Spector, and Robert Yang (Fundamental Research Labs).

Caveats noted in the coverage: Polar’s headline benchmark scores (claimed 98.0 vs 75.5 for next-best browser agent) come from Polar’s own published evaluation with methodology on GitHub, not an independent third party. By Polar’s own account to TechCrunch, most current users don’t use Polar as their main browser — they keep Chrome and open Polar to hand off a task. The $5.7 million funds model and agent-orchestration work to push past 15-hour unsupervised runs, and broader distribution; Jiang has said the team is open to expanding past the browser into general computer use once the browser wedge is proven.