Aside: The AI Browser That Actually Gets Work Done

What is Aside — and who's behind it?

Aside is an AI browser that didn't set out to summarize your tabs — it set out to do the work. The product comes from Aside Computer Inc. in San Francisco, founded in 2024 and part of Y Combinator's F25 batch (Y Combinator). Notably, the team is exactly three people. CEO Jun Kim and co-founder Chanhee Lee come from the analytics startup Airbridge.io, which Lee helped scale to $30M ARR as a founding engineer; the third founder, Sanghun Lee, has been coding since age 14 and built apps with over a million downloads.

The idea in one sentence: a browser that gets real work done across your already logged-in websites — email, dashboards, internal tools, documents, spreadsheets, messages, even payments. As of late May 2026, TechCrunch still listed Aside as "upcoming" in its browser-wars roundup (TechCrunch) — it has since gone live.

The real trick: no integrations

The decisive difference is how Aside works. Most AI agents need APIs, connectors, and integrations — and fail at exactly the tools that don't have any. Aside takes the opposite route: it operates your accounts directly in the browser, the way you would. Click, type, navigate. You're already logged in anyway.

That sounds unremarkable, but it's the lever. It means Aside can also reach the in-house ERP, the old reporting dashboard, or the supplier portal that never had an official interface. While Perplexity's Comet (limited to paying Max subscribers), Arc's Dia (invite-only), and OpenAI's Atlas mostly talk about the page, Aside wants to actually finish the multi-step task. That stamina is exactly what turns AI agents for SMBs from a nice gimmick into a real helper for routine work.

The numbers: what the benchmarks say

Our rule still holds: numbers before promises. By its own account, Aside leads three agent benchmarks — Online-Mind2Web, BU-Bench-V1, and Odyssey. The most direct comparison comes from Online-Mind2Web, a standard test for agentic browsing: Aside scores 99.0%, ahead of Browser Use (97.7%) and GPT-5.4 (92.8%).

An important caveat: these are the vendor's own figures, not an independent audit — and vendors rarely pick benchmarks that flatter the competition. Even with a healthy skeptic's discount, the direction is remarkable: a three-person team leaving established heavyweights behind. Which AI model is worth it for which task is something we sort out in our 2026 AI tool comparison.

Privacy: local instead of cloud

For the European market, this may be the most important point. Aside is local-first: per the vendor, tasks, memory, and data stay on the device, and nothing is passed through to the AI providers. Encryption happens in the Secure Enclave, including post-quantum encryption. Passwords are filled directly into the website — not handed to the agent. And sensitive actions like payments or messages require your explicit approval.

That's a different risk profile than "send everything to a cloud agent and hope for the best." Anyone dealing with GDPR and data sovereignty knows why that matters — even if a local approach doesn't replace a case-by-case legal review (see the EU AI Act).

The honest part: the caveats

So this doesn't turn into a brochure — the limitations, as of June 2026:

• macOS only. There's no Windows version yet.
• "Bring your own model". Aside is the shell; you bring the intelligence — a ChatGPT or Claude subscription, or your own API key. There's no official price for the browser itself yet.
• Brand new and tiny. A three-person team with no enterprise support and no multi-year track record. No knock — but a factor for business-critical workflows.

Our advice: brand new also means "not yet battle-tested." For critical workflows: test in a contained setting first, then trust it. Don't blindly automate your bookkeeping on day one.

What it means for marketing & e-commerce

And now the part that goes beyond "neat tool." Aside is just the most visible symptom of a wave: agents that no longer only read the web but operate it. Three consequences we're keeping an eye on:

1. Ops automation becomes tangible. Pulling reports from five dashboards, maintaining orders, updating product listings — dull click-work, including in tools without an API. For small teams, a real lever, not a toy.
2. The customer journey gets a new actor. When agents research, compare, and buy on behalf of users, you're no longer optimizing only for humans and Google, but for machines that read and operate your site. Clean flows, structured data, and unambiguous CTAs go from nice-to-have to a real factor — exactly what we measure as AI visibility.
3. Speed is the advantage. Whoever understands these tools early and builds them into processes saves hours. Whoever waits pays them.

The browser wars stopped being about tabs and bookmarks long ago. They're about who takes over your busywork. Aside isn't (yet) a finished product for everyone — but it's the most convincing evidence so far that agentic browsers are leaving demo mode behind.