Haven
Banking needs a safer browser
Details
- External ID
- 46165532
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Haven
- Website domain
- starthaven.com
- Launched
- Dec. 5, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 10
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4933206106870229
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
My team and I built Haven. It is a stripped down browser that only connects to verified financial institutions and blocks everything else. No extensions, no injected scripts, no overlays, no random third party code. It is not a general browser, it is just a controlled environment for banking and investing.Why? I have spent years building browser extensions and know exactly how much power they have. The extension model is useful, but the security model is too loose and a single malicious install can see everything, rewrite everything, and mislead a user without leaving a trace. My dad learned that the hard way after installing a fake Zoom extension and then losing money from his banking account.In addition to my dad’s story, the number of people adding AI into their current browsers or using AI native browsers is growing and offers amazing capabilities, but the risks are growing exponentially. I wanted to build a way for him and for anyone, from sophisticated users to normal users, to bank safely.It is currently free for consumers as we learn how people use it and determine a future revenue model for providing secure sessions. At our core we believe in privacy, which is the reason we are building this product. We are funded by trusted and established investors including Google Ventures, Valley Capital Partners, and others.If you want to try it the app is at https://starthaven.com.Looking for people to test this out, get product feedback and feature requests!
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Fintech
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- secure browser for banking
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic browser extension or Electron-based kiosk browser is easy to prototype, but building a production-grade secure browser with reliable phishing detection, real-time threat intelligence, and zero-trust domain allowlisting is difficult.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires either a Chromium fork or a strict WebExtension communicating with a backend trust-verification engine. The backend must continuously curate, verify, and monitor financial domains, TLS certificates, and reputation feeds while preventing sophisticated spoofing and DNS rebinding attacks. Ensuring ironclad endpoint security against zero-day bypasses and malicious extensions demands dedicated infosec and browser-internals expertise.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Mullvad Browser, Bitwarden password manager
Concerns raised: Whether integration with password managers increases attack surface, Convenience vs. security tradeoff for banking workflows
Feature requests: Pre-populated list of banks for one-click access, Quick bank selection interface
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 42 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 43 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 32 days after the earliest competitor.
- Ifso.io · hn · 2026-09-20 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Finterm.ai Bloomberg terminal for Claude Code · hn · 2026-07-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Pane · hn · 2026-03-03 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Havenley · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I was laid off, so I built a NerdWallet for startup equity liquidity · hn · 2026-03-16 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- We charge $10/mo for wealth management that costs $100 elsewhere · hn · 2025-11-13 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Ekselio · hn · 2026-09-25 · 42 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- We post-trained a model that pen tests instead of refusing · hn · 2026-06-20 · 93 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.