
Founded by Alex Forman
He started coding at 12 to build bots to purchase limited edition sneakers in seconds. After leaving that scene, he led engineering at a trading card market platform and researched political botnets at Berkeley. No matter where he went, he realized how crucial live web data and interaction is and how slow current solutions are. He launched the first version of Parse in August and got to 35k users in a month.
Headless browsers are the default for web scraping and automation, but they're painfully slow and unreliable at scale. Scraping thousands of dynamic pages with Playwright or Puppeteer takes hours, often failing halfway through due to timeouts or memory issues. Repeat tasks become absurdly expensive at scale due to the cost of managing hundreds of concurrent browsers.
Parse reverse engineers the underlying network requests behind any action on a website and build a deterministic API to replicate it. Parse automatically handles dynamic values (session cookies, CSRF tokens, etc.), IP rotation, and antibot challenges.
Parse is able to build a set of endpoints to handle dynamic multi-turn interactions, such as getting the questions on a job application through one endpoint and submitting the job application through another endpoint, even though every application has unique questions.
Demo: https://youtu.be/UZGYkH2vAS4
All of this means that the APIs that Parse generates execute in seconds and cost fractions of a cent to run.