SmartBrowse Wants to Close Your 14 Shopping Tabs (All of Them. Yes, That One Too.)

Written By Doug Erickson

Born at CruzHacks, SmartBrowse is an AI shopping agent that does the tab-hoarding, Reddit-spelunking, price-checking grind for you — then shows its work in a transparent dashboard. See them live at New Tech on July 1.

Here's a thing your brain does every time you buy something online.

You start with one tab. A reasonable tab. Then you remember reviews can be fake, so you open Reddit. Then you wonder if it's cheaper somewhere else, so you open three more retailers. Then a spec sheet. Then a YouTube teardown. Forty minutes later you're 14 tabs deep, comparing two nearly identical dry-erase markers, and a small voice asks: what am I doing with my one wild and precious life?

The SmartBrowse team kept hearing that voice. So at CruzHacks — UC Santa Cruz's annual hackathon — Rachit Verma and Shiva Ravinutala (UCSC) and Arnav Dixit (Santa Clara University) spent a weekend building a fix. They left with two awards: Best Productivity Hack (sponsored by Opennote) and Best Use of Gemini.

Now, you might be thinking: "Doesn't ChatGPT already do this?"

Sort of! And that's the problem.

Ask a chatbot what to buy and you get an answer trapped in a chat window — maybe sponsored, no exact prices, no visible sources. It's an oracle handing down a verdict and asking you to just... trust it. Which is a weird amount of faith to place in a black box that has never owned a whiteboard.

SmartBrowse flips that. The AI agent does the legwork — it asks smart follow-up questions about brand, budget, and use case, then scrapes real prices, specs, and reviews across sites like Amazon and eBay. But instead of a verdict, you get a visual comparison dashboard: prices, features, and reviews charted side by side, sources and reasoning included. The agent does the research. You make the call. Human stays in the driver's seat; robot rides shotgun with the map.

The hackathon judges told them to actually build the thing, so they did — adding Ruthwika Gajjala (UCSC), Kaitlyn Chiu (San José State), and Nicole Liu (UCSC), expanding site coverage, and making it faster.

"AI can finally do the boring part of online shopping for us — the tabs, the Reddit deep-dives, the price-checking," says co-founder Rachit Verma. "But we didn't want to just hand the decision to a black box. SmartBrowse does the research and puts it all in front of you transparently, so you stay in the driver's seat."

Try it at smart-browse-agentic-shopper.vercel.app — and see the team present at Santa Cruz Works New Tech on July 1, 2026.

Team SmartBrowse

  • Rachit Verma — UC Santa Cruz (co-founder)

  • Shiva Ravinutala — UC Santa Cruz (co-founder)

  • Arnav Dixit — Santa Clara University (co-founder)

  • Ruthwika Gajjala — UC Santa Cruz

  • Kaitlyn Chiu — San José State University

  • Nicole Liu — UC Santa Cruz

Related Articles

Doug Erickson
Next

How a Stranger at a Trade Show Booth Got Treeswax Into Japan