START: Tarun Vedula & Alex Blackwell, Co-founders, Zatanna: “Turning all software into agent-first APIs”

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Right now most AI agents interact with software the way humans do

They open a browser, look at a screenshot, and try to figure out what to click

That's like ripping the LIDAR off a Waymo and handing it a cameraTarun & Alex kept running into this problem. They were building an AI receptionist for dentists, and at conference after conference people asked the same thing: do you integrate with X or Y platform?

Seven other people were doing the same thing. None of them could integrate. Alex and Tarun could, because they knew how to reverse engineer network requests

That's when they stopped digging for gold and started selling shovels

Zatanna turns legacy software into APIs by working at the network layer. No browsers. No screenshots. Just requests

10x faster on the workflows they benchmarked. Near-zero browser costs. Reliability goes from 70% to nearly 100%.

Computers shouldn't navigate the web like humans do. Humans use screens. Computers use requests

"No browser bots to babysit"

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🎙️ Tarun Vedula & Alex Blackwell, Co-founders, Zatanna on Fondo START
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00:57 From jury research to API infrastructure

02:04 The "sell the shovels" realization

03:18 Why browser agents break at scale

04:42 Turning legacy systems into APIs

05:47 Why repetitive workflows shouldn't use browsers

06:37 Teaching AI agents to navigate like computers

08:34 Founder-market fit and knowing when to pivot

10:20 From sneaker bots to reverse engineering anti-bots

12:23 The future of AI vs anti-bot warfare

13:37 Why companies are still stuck at 70% reliability

Check out www.zatanna.ai to learn more.