NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS NEWS
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I spend an embarrassing amount of time each week copying data from one website to another, filling out the same forms repeatedly, and clicking through identical sequences of actions. If you work in a browser – and let’s face it, most of us do – you know exactly what I’m talking about.
This is the dirty secret of modern knowledge work: we’ve automated factories, but we’re still running digital sweatshops where educated professionals waste hours doing mind-numbing repetitive tasks that computers should handle.
Enter Composite, a San Francisco startup that’s just raised US$5.6 million to solve this problem. What caught my attention isn’t just the impressive investor list (Anthropic, Menlo Ventures, NFDG) or the fact that two of the three co-founders are young New Zealanders. It’s that they’re attacking a problem I live with every single day.
Here’s what Yang Fan Yun, one of Composite’s co-founders, observed during his time at Uber: highly educated people spending their days as “digital factory workers.” Marketing specialists are copying data between dashboards. Recruiters are manually updating spreadsheets. Security engineers gather information from multiple systems just to write a single report.
We’ve got billion-dollar AI chatbots that can write poetry and explain quantum physics, but somehow we’re still manually copying customer details from Gmail into Salesforce.
The inefficiency is staggering. One security engineer at Composite works with used to spend hours every week manually gathering data from Jira, Google Drive, and internal dashboards to produce security architecture reviews. Not analysing the data or making decisions – just collecting it and reformatting it.
That’s not knowledge work. That’s data entry with a fancy job title.
You’ve probably heard about the new wave of “AI browsers” from companies like Perplexity and OpenAI. They’re getting plenty of press coverage, and they can do some clever things like booking flights or finding information.
But they miss the point entirely.
These browsers want you to abandon Chrome or Edge – along with all your bookmarks, extensions, saved passwords, and existing workflow. They’re asking millions of people to completely change how they work just to access automation that mostly handles generic consumer tasks.
Composite takes the opposite approach. Instead of replacing your browser, it works with whatever browser you’re already using. Chrome, Edge, Arc – doesn’t matter. You keep your setup, your extensions, your saved logins. Composite just makes it all smarter.
The technology is straightforward in concept, sophisticated in execution. You install a browser extension. It watches what you do, learns your patterns, and offers to automate repetitive tasks.
Hit a keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+Space on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows), and a lightweight overlay appears showing suggested automations based on your actual work. No chatbot interface. No lengthy prompts. Just “I noticed you do this every week – want me to handle it?”
The clever bit is that everything runs locally on your device. Composite never asks for your passwords or credentials. It piggybacks on the accounts you’re already logged into. Your banking details, customer data, confidential documents – none of it leaves your computer.
For businesses worried about AI systems uploading sensitive information to the cloud, this is a game-changer.
A product manager at Uber uses Composite to automatically update project trackers and run data queries – work that previously consumed hours each week. The system doesn’t just save time; it frees him to focus on actual product decisions rather than administrative busywork.
Another user, a security engineer at a major tech company, now generates those weekly architecture reports with a single prompt. Composite researches across all the disparate internal systems and synthesises the documentation automatically.
These aren’t trivial time savings. We’re talking about giving highly paid professionals back multiple hours every week to do the work they were actually hired to do.
Building this isn’t simple. Web pages aren’t designed for automation. Every site has different layouts, different interaction patterns, and different ways of handling data. Teaching AI to navigate this chaos reliably is genuinely hard.
Composite uses multiple AI models simultaneously – small, fast models for simple tasks, larger vision models for complex operations. It’s not locked into any single AI provider’s ecosystem, which means it can always use the best tool for each job.
The system also has to handle long-running, complex workflows. Processing hundreds of support tickets or updating dozens of project trackers requires maintaining context across thousands of sequential steps. The AI needs to plan, execute in parallel, and bring everything back together coherently.
Yang Fan Yun and his co-founders – Shine Wu (another Kiwi) and American entrepreneur Charlie Deane – are tackling these challenges head-on. Within two months of launching, they had thousands of users. That’s not hype-driven adoption; that’s people with real problems finding real solutions.
We’ve spent the last decade talking about AI transforming work. What we’ve mostly gotten are chatbots that write emails and image generators that make art. Useful, sure. Transformative? Not really.
Composite represents something different: AI that actually changes how work gets done. Not by replacing workers, but by eliminating the tedious garbage that stops them from doing valuable work.
Think about what happens when you give someone back five or ten hours a week. They don’t just do more tasks. They have time to think strategically, solve complex problems, and build relationships with colleagues and customers. They can focus on the work that requires creativity, judgement, and genuine human insight.
That’s the real promise of AI – not replacing people, but freeing them from digital drudgery.
Composite offers a basic free version and a paid tier at US$20 per month. That’s remarkably affordable for something that could save hours each week. They’re clearly betting on volume and eventual enterprise sales rather than extracting maximum revenue from each user immediately.
The smart move would be tiered enterprise pricing based on the number of users and the complexity of automations. If a company has 100 people each saving five hours a week, that’s 500 hours of recovered productivity weekly. Any reasonable CFO would pay serious money for that.
However, the founders appear to be focused on getting the technology right first and then determining the optimal pricing later. Given their investors include some of the smartest money in Silicon Valley, that approach is probably sound.
Composite is working on better automatic task detection – having the system proactively identify and suggest automations rather than waiting for users to request them. They’re also building scheduling capabilities so recurring tasks can run automatically without any human involvement.
The Windows version launched alongside their recent funding announcement. Mac users have had it for a while, but Windows still dominates in enterprise environments. That’s where the real money is.
More importantly, they’re proving that AI can be genuinely useful in everyday work without requiring people to completely change their habits or trust their sensitive data to cloud systems they don’t control.
Every few years, someone declares that “this changes everything” about how we work. Usually, it doesn’t. We still sit at desks, stare at screens, and attend too many meetings.
But occasionally, something genuinely shifts. Email transformed business communication. Cloud software eliminated the need for on-premise servers. Video conferencing (finally) became viable and necessary.
Browser automation might be the next real shift. Not because it’s sexy or futuristic, but because it solves a problem that affects millions of people every single day.
I’m not suggesting Composite will become the next Google or Microsoft. But they’re attacking a genuine problem with a practical solution. They’ve got credible backing, experienced founders, and early traction with real users.
That’s more than most startups can claim.
And if they succeed, maybe I’ll finally stop wasting hours every week on tasks that a computer should be handling.
Now that would be worth celebrating.
Composite is currently available for Mac and Windows. The basic version is free, with a premium tier at US$20/month. More information at composite.com
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