Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code (intunedhq.com)
82 points by fkilaiwi 4 hours ago
Hey HN, we're Faisal and Ahmad from Intuned (https://intunedhq.com). We’re building a platform for building, deploying, and maintaining browser automations.
Customers primarily use the Intuned AI agent to automate websites that don't expose APIs. Common use-cases include scraping data, pulling reports, and submitting forms. As the website changes, our agent also helps automatically heal the automation.
On Intuned, browser automations are created by an AI agent and run as code. Our infra captures the context of every run, allowing our agent to debug and maintain the underlying code - to keep the automations working over time. This way, we’re able to offer the predictability, speed, and cost of code, without the painful parts of writing and maintaining it.
Here’s a demo of building a scraper on Intuned: https://youtu.be/ruZP73bK4FU
Here’s a demo of using AI to maintain a project: https://youtu.be/e4R4hLdHBro
Backstory: we were accepted into YC for a completely different idea. During the batch, because of Faisal's background at UiPath, several batchmates asked us whether RPA tools could fill API gaps in their products by automating websites without APIs. When it was time to pivot, we went back to those founders to dig deeper. (RPA in this context is referring to using UI automation to do complete non-testing tasks)
We discovered that the actual hard problem in browser automation is maintenance. Websites change, selectors break, and failures can be painful to reproduce and fix. So in early 2024, we decided to take a crack at this problem with a handful of customers. It needed a fair number of iterations before we landed on our current code-first approach.
How it works: Intuned is infra + agent, deeply integrated.
On the infrastructure side, Intuned is a managed runtime for browser automation code. Projects are usually Playwright-based TypeScript or Python. Users can write them directly in our online IDE, or hand the work off to the agent. Either way, once deployed, the platform runs each project in its own isolated machine and handles auth/session reuse, scheduling, batch execution, concurrency, observability, and the other plumbing around running browser code.
On the agent side, it took us a few iterations to get to the current approach. Our initial attempts were rigid pipelines: collect requirements, inspect the site, generate code, then try to patch whatever broke. It looked reasonable on paper, but real websites are too messy for fixed paths. Late last year, we were planning to ship that version when stronger models landed and harnesses like Claude Code and Codex showed what a more open-ended coding agent could do. We built a prototype on the Claude Agent SDK, it felt much better than what we had, and we scrapped the release and decided to rebuild the agent.
The rebuild came down to three pieces around the SDK: an execution environment for running long agent sessions reliably, a CLI that exposes the platform to the agent so it operates Intuned the way engineers do, and a custom plugin (skills + MCP) built around what we've learned building browser automations.
The infra-agent integration is where the product gets more interesting. The runtime doesn't just run the automation; it captures the context needed to debug it when it fails: params, results, traces, logs. That enables features like Fix with AI, where you can open a failed run and have the agent investigate and prepare a fix.
The same integration powers a feature called self-healing. For configured projects, the platform detects failures, starts an agent session with the relevant context, and either proposes a fix for review or deploys it automatically. Demo: https://youtu.be/IVHIXw0lYMs
We recently also packaged the infra and agent as an API called Web Task API, here is a demo: https://youtu.be/1olRn3l95vw
We strongly believe that browser automations can and should be faster, cheaper and more predictable. Check us out at https://app.intuned.io/, we have a free tier with trial credits for your first few automations. Excited to hear your thoughts, questions, and feedback!
trollbridge 2 hours ago
Biggest question I have is how this will overcome sites that implement aggressive anti-automation security. I can easily automate websites with existing tools until I slam into that wall.
fkilaiwi 2 hours ago
Great question - we tried so many things and overtime, we ended up doing 2 things - custom chromium build and extension to solve captchas. In our docs, checkout stealth mode - https://intunedhq.com/docs/main/02-features/stealth-mode-cap...
Also, one of our engineers did a write up on bot detection systems and how they work - https://intunedhq.com/blog/how-bot-detection-works
Eridrus 17 minutes ago
This never made it into prod since the scale was small, but one of the favorite leaks I found when working on bot detection was browsers which generated the same random numbers. Presumably because they were being init to the same VM snapshot and therefore the same random number state.
arbol an hour ago
So far its cost me $2.27 to submit a contact form 3 times - why is this better than a captcha solver with human solves at 1000 per $2?
On your automation, your tool fed back to me as follows after 3 submissions:
> The CAPTCHA is persistently blocking now — Prosopo's widget appears to have flagged the session/IP due to the repeated submissions. The checkbox won't reset this time. This is expected behavior from their bot protection product. To submit again, you'd likely need to wait a while for the rate limit to clear, or submit manually from your own browser.
fkilaiwi an hour ago
kachoio 40 minutes ago
I create scrapers on my own when I need one, but this is a cool idea. Best of luck with it.
fkilaiwi 39 minutes ago
thanks! give us a try next time and checkout fix with ai when the scraper breaks!
dwiner 29 minutes ago
This is a really neat idea. Congrats on the launch!
fkilaiwi 23 minutes ago
thank you!
Oras 3 hours ago
Congrats on launch. I have experienced these issues first hand with `Open Finance` a few years ago.
I feel that you'll end up being an automation agency (you mentioned UiPath), companies who have the skills and capacity to build, will not need your service. But those who want the full service, you might fill a gap.
I wish you all the best.
fkilaiwi 3 hours ago
thanks for the kind words! We have been seeing this pattern of customers wanting full service since we launch. Let's see how it goes!
jackienotchan 3 hours ago
I'm always genuinely curious on how startups navigate the founder maze as it helps to break the myth of an overnight success story.
Based on your YC page, you went through a couple of pivots over the last years:
- 4 years ago: Intuned - The data assistant for engineering leaders [0]
- 2 years ago: Intuned - The browser automation platform for developers and product teams [1]
- 1 year ago: Intuned Auth Sessions - Build authenticated scrapers and RPA [2]
What was kind of the evolution from YC S22 4 years ago till you arrived at today's launch? How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? Even within YC, there are many competitors like Firecrawl, Reworkd, BrowserUse, NotteLabs, Browserbase, etc.
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Intuned respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Gqr-intuned-the-data-as...
[1]https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/LGE-intuned-the-browser...
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Lpq-intuned-auth-sessio...
fkilaiwi 3 hours ago
We actually went through 1 hard pivot only, the reset is more about framing the problem as we dug deeper and understood the customers and issue more. As an example, "Intuned Auth Sessions" is just a feature that we still support today! But you are right, being a founder is not easy and the hardest part is figuring out what to build, does it make sense to keep going or should you stop - those are questions I still struggle with until today.
For your question about how is this different - I think if you dig into those product you will see that our focus is different, many of the companies mentioned are focused on powering agents via APIs, some are focused on enabling users to use AI at runtime, we do feel that our product is somewhat differentiated - the closest one is possibly Reworkd and I would still say the product is somewhat different. Now, the hardest part is actually commenting this with customers and the market in general - and there, we have a lot to figure out!
For robots.txt and user-agents question, we think of ourselves as providing infrastructure and flexibility for our customers to do what they want - we do encourage in our docs that they respect robots.txt but we don't enforce it on a platform level.
Appreciate you taking the time to leave this comment - very thoughtful
zuzululu 37 minutes ago
cool but we already pay $200/month to OpenAI to turn automation into code
fkilaiwi 36 minutes ago
definitely came up multiple times. Next week, we are releasing our codex/claude plugin, so you will be able to use codex to create the projects and deploy them to Intuned.
Intuned as a platform to deploy browser automation adds a lot - anti-bot detection, jobs, observability and more.
zuzululu 29 minutes ago
I see I'm already using a FOSS project for anti-bot
for jobs/durability/obs i have sqlite and had codex generate an ugly but functional dashboard
im just curious to know what intune does that is different
fkilaiwi 20 minutes ago
asdev 3 hours ago
Is this a bet that Computer Use models don't get better and cheaper?
fkilaiwi 3 hours ago
If you think about "price", "speed" and "accuracy (reliability/quality)", our bet is that models won't hit those 3 together. So you won't get a model that is very fast, very cheap and very accurate anytime soon.
Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? its also predictable, if it messes up, you know what happened and you can trace it to the exact line of code.
nullbio an hour ago
What is the advantage of your product over having Codex generate a script using something like https://github.com/D4Vinci/Scrapling?
fkilaiwi an hour ago
fazkan 24 minutes ago
this is actually really cool
fkilaiwi 23 minutes ago
thank you!
ianm218 4 hours ago
Where have you found early traction with users? Why has your solution been useful for these users relevant to the other options?
fkilaiwi 4 hours ago
Yes, we we did our YC and social launches, we had few companies sign up and we have been building with them sense. For some of them, we have enabled them to run 1000+ scrapers which would have been very hard without Intuned. Some of these have been with us for 2+ years! What our users love is the agent and the idea that we are not using AI at runtime which improves reliability.
rrr_oh_man 4 hours ago
How well would this work for a "go to hotel booking site, book 2 weeks in June for a family of 4" type of workflows?
fkilaiwi 4 hours ago
this is not meant as personal assistant to do a task like this - the idea is that if you want to build a travel assistant and you want to do an integration with a travel booking service using browser automation - you can use Intuned to build this integration and expose an API to do search and one to do a booking, etc. Does this make sense?
TZubiri 2 hours ago
What's the benefit of using playwright instead of an official webdriver directly?
fkilaiwi 2 hours ago
We actually do support CDP directly as well. As for why playwright, playwright provides a lot of benefits that we like in terms of being code - like auto-waiting, good syntax for a lot of operations, agents can use playwright pretty well and playwright is generally like by the community we target.
If a customer, doesn't want to use playwright, they don't have to given CDP but we most of our templates use playwright.