Overview
News
Technologies
Salaries
Products
People
Growth
Offices
Jobs
Financials

Funding and backers

Total raised
$4.5M
2 rounds on record
Latest round
$4.5M
Seed · 2026 · 2 mo ago
Team
1-10
employees, estimated range
Hiring now
1
+1 posted in 30 days
Backers
1
ISAI
The money's age
Fresh money
2 months since the last round · and hiring
Momentum
33/100
hiring for its size, fresh money
Last sign of life
this month
a posting or a news item
Tractionpublic signals, read monthly
Web presence
top 6%
of 133.2M domains by links, Common Crawl
GitHub stars
357 public repositories
Hacker News stories
10
best: 212 points
Funding rounds
RoundDateAmountInvestorsSource
Seed 2026 $4.5M — trysignalbase.com
Pre-Seed Jun 2025 — — Lightpanda
Founders and leadersfrom filings, registers and the company's site
Francis BouvierCo-founder & CEO
Katie BrownCo-founder & COO
Pierre TachoireCo-founder
Backed byfrom the funds' portfolios and accelerator catalogs
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Overview

Lightpanda develops an open-source headless browser designed for machines, used for web automation, crawling and AI agents rather than for human browsing. The engine is written from scratch in Zig, is not based on Chromium, Blink or WebKit, runs JavaScript without rendering pages, and in its own benchmark ran 9 times faster with 16 times less memory than headless Chrome while staying compatible with Puppeteer and Playwright through CDP. The French company was founded in 2022 by Francis Bouvier, raised a pre-seed led by ISAI in 2025 and a $4.5 million seed round in January 2026.

News

News Lightpanda 3 months ago
Introducing Lightpanda Agent and PandaScript: LLM at buildtime not runtime - Blog
Lightpanda now has a built-in agent. Talk to it in natural language, get a reliable script back. Run that script forever only calling an LLM when it needs fixing.
Read more
Report
News Geeky Gadgets 5 months ago
Meet the 64MB Browser Built Entirely for AI Agents and Automation : Lightpanda
Discover how Lightpanda, a 64MB headless browser built in Zig, offers 9x faster speeds and 16x less memory usage than Chrome for AI web scraping.
Read more
Report
News Lightpanda 8 months ago
Migrating our DOM to Zig - Blog
We replaced LibDOM with a custom Zig implementation for better cohesion across events, Custom Elements, and ShadowDOM. Here's how we built it and what we learned along the way.
Read more
Report
News Lightpanda 9 months ago
Why We Built Lightpanda in Zig - Blog
We chose Zig over C++ and Rust because we wanted a simple, modern systems language. Here's what we learned building a browser with it.
Read more
Report
News Lightpanda 1 year ago
Lightpanda raises pre-seed to develop the first browser built for machines and AI - Blog
We're excited to share that Lightpanda has raised a pre-seed round to build the first browser designed from the ground up for machines.
Read more
Report

Tech stack

Technologies named in job postings at Lightpanda over the last 12 months, by layer, with the share of postings for each.
Technologies in use
5
Postings analysed
1
Stack modernity
76/100
Languages
C++
JavaScript
Cloud & platforms
GitHub
Developer tools
Chrome DevTools
Practices & domains
AI Agents
Sign in to see how your skills match this stack Sign In

Products

Lightpanda Cloud
Hosted Lightpanda browsers compatible with Puppeteer and Playwright APIs as a drop-in replacement for Chrome.
lightpanda.io
Lightpanda browser
Open-source headless browser engine in Zig with CDP and MCP support. Skips rendering to cut memory and time per page.
lightpanda.io

People

Francis Bouvier
Co-founder & CEO
Paris-based developer and entrepreneur who founded Lightpanda in April 2022.
Katie Brown
Co-founder & COO
Co-founder and chief operating officer of Lightpanda.
Pierre Tachoire
Co-founder
Co-author of the Lightpanda browser engine.
Names and roles come from public filings, company registers and the company's own site. Is this you? Correct or remove

Growth

Hiring Momentum
53/100
Stable
Open positions
1
1 opened / 0 closed in 30 days
Hiring Dynamics 0%
Hiring Focus
The percentage next to each role is its share of the company's job openings over the last 90 days; the arrow shows the shift versus the previous period.
Hardware
100% ▲

Offices

Where the company hires and what each office is for
Cities
1
Hiring now
1
Countries
1
Busiest office
Paris
Paris France
HQ
1 open roles 1 posted in 90 days 100% engineering 100% remote 1-10 est. staff
hires for Hardware
seen since Sep 2026 job postings

Jobs

≈ $61k – $135k per year (Estimated) • Equity • Remote (EU) • Full-Time • Paris
JavaScript
C++
AI Agents
DevOps
GitHub
QA
Chrome DevTools
Apply

Financials

Total raised
$4.5M
Latest round
Seed
Funding rounds
2
Investors
3
Funding rounds
Round Announced Amount
Seed 2026 $4.5M Details
Pre-Seed 2025 — Details
Key Investors
Factorial Capital Pre-Seed
Factorial Capital is an early-stage fund that invests alongside operator-angels.
factorialcap.com
Kima Ventures Pre-Seed
Kima Ventures is a Paris-based seed investor funded by Xavier Niel that backs hundreds of startups a year.
kimaventures.com
ISAI Pre-Seed
ISAI is a Paris venture capital firm backed by tech entrepreneurs, investing in early-stage technology companies.
isai.vc