About this episode

Tarun Vedula and Alex Blackwell discuss how Zatanna transforms legacy software into agent-first APIs, improving efficiency and reliability.

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 camera Tarun & 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" ‍ 🎙️ Tarun Vedula & Alex Blackwell , Co-founders, Zatanna on Fondo START ‍ 00:57 From jury research to API infrastructure 02:04 The "sell the shovels" realization 03:18 Why browser agents break at…

People in this episode

Host: Fondo

Guests: Tarun Vedula, Alex Blackwell

Topics covered

• AI agents
• software integration
• APIs
• network layer
• entrepreneurship
• reverse engineering

Keywords

• AI
• APIs
• software
• integration
• network requests
• browser costs
• workflow efficiency

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Zatanna, Waymo

More episodes of START

• START: Dawson Chen, CEO & Founder, Letterbook "AI-native customer support platform" · July 20, 2026 · 10 min
• START: Emma Lawler, Product Lead, Rippling "Rippling Automated Compliance" · July 17, 2026 · 25 min
• START: Agaaz Singhal, Founder & CEO, Tranzmit AI "Self-improving AI paywalls" · July 15, 2026 · 6 min
• START: Kyle Wong, Co-Founder & CEO, InstaAgent “Scale marketing campaigns across hundreds of personas” · July 13, 2026 · 11 min
• START: Koby Conrad, Founder & CEO, Sunflower Sober: “The #1 AI Companion for sobriety" · July 10, 2026 · 10 min
• START: Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian “Forward-deployed AI Agents” · July 8, 2026 · 10 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the START podcast page.