Anchor (Anchor Browser)
Anchor Browser provides cloud-hosted Chromium instances optimised for AI agent use — anti-detect, persistent sessions, residential proxies, CAPTCHA handling. Founded 2023, YC W24. $2.6M seed disclosed. Distinct from Browserless by adding persistent-state + anti-detect optimised for AI-agent web workflows.
At a glance
- Type
- Cloud-hosted browser for AI agents (anti-detect, persistent state)
- Tier
- T3
- Created
- 2023 (founded); YC W24
- Latest release
- not applicable — sandbox/runtime, not memory product
- License
- not applicable — not OSS
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo
- Pricing
- Free + per-session pricing; Pro + Team tiers
- Funding
- $2.6M seed (YC + Long Journey Ventures + others)
Taxonomy
- storage
- none-trivial
- retrieval
- none
- persistence
- ephemeral
- update
- read-only
- unit
- file
- governance
- opaque
- conflict
- out-of-scope
When to use
Optimised for: AI-agent browser workflows with persistent state + anti-detect
Anti-fit: not applicable — sandbox/runtime, not memory product
Pros & cons
Pros
AI-agent-specific feature set (anti-detect + persistent state); YC W24 backing; clean developer UX for browser-agent backends.
Cons
Small seed (vs Browserless / Bright Data); newer brand; managed-only.
Claims & capabilities
YC W24; $2.6M seed; cloud Chromium with anti-detect + persistent sessions; positioned specifically for AI-agent web workflows
Technical surface
- API surface
- REST + Playwright-compatible
- Backend storage
- not applicable — sandbox/runtime, not memory product
- Deployment
- Managed cloud only
- Embedding model
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Multi-tenancy
- not applicable — sandbox/runtime, not memory product
- MCP
- not applicable — sandbox/runtime, not memory product
- A2A
- not applicable — sandbox/runtime, not memory product
- OpenTelemetry
- not applicable — sandbox/runtime, not memory product
Similar systems
Other ai sandbox & runtime environments in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
- Browserless.io T2
Browserless is a headless-browser-as-a-service — managed Chromium / Playwright / Puppeteer endpoints for web scraping, screenshots, PDF generation, web automation. Increasingly used as substrate for browser-agent products. Founded 2017 by Joel Griffith. Bootstrapped + small seed. Distinct from Playwright OSS — Browserless ships managed Chromium farms with anti-bot circumvention.
- Coder.com T2
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- CodeSandbox AI T2
CodeSandbox is the long-running browser-based dev sandbox (founded 2017 by Ives van Hoorne + Bas Buursma in Amsterdam). **Acquired by Together AI Oct-2024** to anchor Together's agent-execution stack alongside its GPU inference cloud. AI features include AI-assisted coding, agent-execution sandboxes, and instant-preview for AI-generated apps.
- Daytona T2
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- e2b T1
e2b provides secure, ephemeral sandboxes (Firecracker microVMs) for AI agent code execution. Each sandbox spins up in <200ms with full Linux environment, Python/Node/etc preinstalled. Substrate for code-agent products including Anthropic Claude Code (artifacts run on e2b), Perplexity, You.com Search, Cognition Devin (partially), and Hugging Face Spaces. Apache 2.0 OSS + managed cloud. $13M Seed + Series A 2024 (Sunflower Capital + a16z).
- Gitpod AI features T2
Gitpod is the original cloud development environment (CDE) — founded 2014 by Sven Efftinge + Johannes Landgraf (also TypeFox / Eclipse Theia / Open VSX). $25M Series A 2022 led by General Catalyst. 2024 launched Gitpod Flex with support for AI agents to run inside dev environments + automation runner. Free OSS tier (Gitpod Self-Hosted) for individual / OSS use.