Composite's Yang Fan Yun (left) and Shine Wu- now both 24 – have known each other since they were in Year 11, aged 15, when they met at the Math Olympiad Camp and NZ Debating Championships, where Yang was representing Auckland and Shine was representing Wellington.
A high-flying young Kiwi, now resident in Silicon Valley, has just landed US$5.6 million ($9.6m) for his start-up called Composite – which makes an artificial intelligence-based tool that automates everyday work tasks.
Composite’s new investors, revealed overnight, include a fund run by the Google- and Amazon-backed Anthropic, the maker of the popular Claude artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
Yang Fan Yun was all over the TV news in 2018 as he was dubbed “New Zealand’s smartest teen” after taking out the Prime Minister’s Award as the highest achiever among the country’s school scholarship students.
He left Auckland for California’s Stanford University soon after. After graduating with a computer science degree in 2023 – achieving the highest grade-point average for his year – he spent a stint as a product manager at Uber before founding Composite in January last year.
Yang was soon joined by American Charlie Deane, who dropped out of Northeastern to co-found Composite. Deane formed a residential proxy (internet anonymity) start-up with US$3.5m annual recurring revenue at age 15.
And a second Kiwi, Victoria University Stats and Economics grad Shine Wu, who earlier won a Robertson Scholarship to study at Duke in North Carolina, joined just months later.
Yang and Shine were already firm friends. The pair - now both 24 – have known each other since they were in Year 11, aged 15, when they met at the Math Olympiad Camp and NZ Debating Championships, where Yang was representing Auckland and Shine was representing Wellington.
Composite sounds a lot like an AI agent and “agentic AI” for automating tasks ranging from organising your inbox to online shopping, which is super hot right now.
But Yang prefers to describe it as an “autopilot for your web browser”.
In one of Composite’s demo videos, its software is used to research a candidate for a role, including analysing posts on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
How can a start-up with a handful of staff compete against agentic web browsers created by the likes of the trendy Perplexity, with its Comet browser, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent (which seems like it will shortly be followed by OpenAI’s first web browser – with another ex-pat Kiwi, Ben Goodger, driving the project)?
Yang says his point of difference is that Composite works with your web browser on your desktop, not an AI firm’s browser in the cloud.
He says that means you don’t have to share your passwords for the software you use every day. As long as you’re logged in, Composite can piggyback on your accounts, with all your personal information staying on your device.
It’s also pitched as non-invasive, with no AI sidebars. Instead, a new “lightweight overlay” that appears, or disappears, from your web browser with a keyboard shortcut.
Although he’s only 24, Yang has already been able to work connections. Uber was one of the first to use Composite, which comes in a basic free version, plus one that costs US$20 a month. Other big names, including Tesla, Google, Salesforce and Reddit followed.
Even though it was running in “stealth mode” until just two months ago in a Mac-only beta programme, Yang says Composite now has “thousands” of users.
Yang won’t give actual numbers, but the momentum has been enough to attract some of the biggest names in the business to Composite’s raise.
The funding round was led by Nat Friedman (former CEO of GitHub, sold to Microsoft for US$7.5 billion) and Daniel Gross (a former Y Combinator partner), the founders of NFDG, a fast-growing venture capital fund in which Meta is reportedly pursuing a stake, with support from Menlo Ventures, Anthropic’s Anthology Fund and New Zealand’s Icehouse Ventures – another early career connection.
“As a Kiwi, I love being actively involved in the New Zealand startup ecosystem, where Icehouse Ventures is a leading player. I interned with Icehouse Ventures the summer after my first-year at Stanford and, having been on the inside, I know I can deeply trust the team. Trust is the single most important trait we look for in an investor,’ Yang says.
Composite’s first major upgrade is available from today, coinciding with its funding announcement.
It includes features that watch your actual work habits, detect the rote tasks bogging you down and complete them automatically, Yang said.
“Composite knows what’s weighing you down and completes them on your behalf – on any website and in any browser.”
A Windows version also launches today.
“Yang is the type of founder where the first question you ask is ‘Can we invest?’ and the second is ‘What are you working on?’,” Icehouse Ventures chief executive Robbie Paul said.
“And to that first question, indeed, we had to ask. Multiple times. Composite was highly sought-after and attracted investment from pre-eminent investors in their space like Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
“I did not need validation that Yang was exceptional, based on the time he spent with us at Icehouse Ventures. Nonetheless, it helped seeing a Stanford CS professor’s effervescent response when I asked about him.”
“There are plenty of super-bright individuals in the world – but few that have the tenacity and commercial drive of Yang. We look forward to supporting him to build the Composite empire.”
Shine told the Herald that Icehouse’s investment was important for Composite to maintain its Kiwi roots. He says he and Yang see it as part of their mission to raise the profile of New Zealand entrepreneurs’ AI efforts in NZ around the globe - which include everything from Neil Ferguson’s self-driving start-up Nuro, backed by billions from Uber and Nvidia, to Nic Lane’s Flower in the UK, developing a new, more efficient way to train gen AI to Goodger’s secret project at OpenAI to Alex Kendall’s Microsoft and Nvidia backed Wayve automotive AI in London.
Yang says “by putting an AI worker directly inside your browser”, Composite:
While other browsers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent and Perplexity’s Comet browser have generated headlines, they are most useful for generic errands like “book a flight to Paris” rather than the grind of real work, Composite’s founders say.
Composite takes a different approach: it transforms your browser into an intelligent partner that understands your specific workflows and handles the tasks that are drowning you, the company says.
Compsite’s pitch: College-educated professionals spend 85% of their day trapped in digital hamster wheels: they’re drowning in tabs, copying data line-by-line across clunky software stacks, and drafting the same memos again and again. Current “AI browsers” only add friction, forcing users to leave the setups they’re accustomed to and delivering results isolated from the tools - for example, email, Google Docs, Notion - they actually use for their work every day.
“Composite has transformed my daily productivity and remolded what it means to work in Chrome,” said Kailiang Fu, a product manager at Uber.
“Composite lifts from my shoulders what used to take me hours of work per week, such as updating project trackers and running data queries.
“What sets Composite apart is how it understands business context across our internal tools and adapts to our actual workflows. This frees me to focus on what matters.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.