Strawberry 1.0 is out of beta: Sweden's AI browser brings AI “companions” to non-technical teams

• Who: Stockholm startup Strawberry, a 12-person team led by co-founders Charles Maddock (CEO), Sebastian Thunman (COO) and Arian Hanifi (CTO).
• What: Strawberry 1.0, an AI browser that leaves beta with AI “companions” for non-technical teams in sales, recruiting, customer support and marketing.
• When: Launched October 26, 2026, after about a year in beta with select clients.
• New in 1.0: Customizable companion looks, nine hireable companions including Sales Sally and Talent Theo, and Companion Plaza, where companions gather around the chat input.
• Cost: Free to try, with subscription packages at $20, $85 and $250 per month depending on credit usage.
• Funding: $6 million raised in October 2025, led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures, with participation from the founders of Lovable, Supabase and Hugging Face; a Series A is planned.

Stockholm startup Strawberry has launched Strawberry 1.0, taking its AI browser out of beta after about a year of testing with select clients. The pitch is deliberately un-technical: instead of a chatbot you prompt, you get AI “companions” that work alongside sales, recruiting, customer-support and marketing teams, inside the browser where their tools, context and logins already live.

The launch matters because it tests a specific bet about where agents belong. Developers already have agents that live in files and terminals; consumers have assistants that live in one long chat. Strawberry argues the browser is the middle ground — familiar to everyone, and already the place where most office work happens.

What is new in 1.0

The headline changes are about the companions themselves. Every companion gets a new look that the user designs — pick a color, try faces until one feels right, or hit randomize. New users can also hire one of nine ready-made Strawberry companions, including Sales Sally for sales and Talent Theo for recruiting. Each arrives knowing its job, with the skills and routines for it, and spends the first chat learning how its user works.

Then there is Companion Plaza, the release's playful side. Select it in the corner of the New Tab page and companions come out to hang around the chat input: they wander, chat with each other about their day, about you, and about the sites you visited. Click one to start working with it, pick one up and toss it, or wiggle the pointer over its head for a headpat. It is a small thing, but it signals what Strawberry wants the product to feel like — colleagues, not commands.

Why a browser at all

Co-founder and CEO Charles Maddock put the case plainly to Tech.eu: “The reason we chose to make Strawberry a browser on your device is because if you think about the work you do on a daily basis, you are not in 10 different files on your computer, you are actually in ten different tabs inside your browser.” He added: “The technology is already here: agents can now work for weeks in a row.”

The companion model follows from that. A companion remembers how a team works and gets better the more it is used, because it is connected to that team's context — and because its work is shared across the business, Strawberry says, it becomes like a colleague rather than a private prompt history locked on one person's laptop. Strawberry is model-agnostic, and early users have built assistants for jobs like sales prospecting.

Who is using it, and what it costs

Strawberry is a small team — 12 people, according to Tech.eu — led by Maddock with Sebastian Thunman as COO and Arian Hanifi as CTO. Enterprises using it include Swedish startup Lovable, which uses it to source engineers, and Tandem Health. The company says the product is free to try, with subscription packages at $20, $85 and $250 per month depending on credit usage.

The funding behind it is modest by frontier-lab standards. In October 2025 Strawberry raised $6 million led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures, with participation from the founders of Lovable, Supabase and Hugging Face. Maddock said the company will raise a Series A when it plans to scale the product across Europe and the US — so 1.0 doubles as the starting gun for that next round.

A crowded field, and a European pitch

Asked about rivals, Maddock said Strawberry competes less with other AI browsers than with the big agent platforms — Claude, ChatGPT, Grok Bot and Gemini. That is a daunting list for a 12-person startup, and 1.0 does not change it. What Strawberry can offer that they cannot is positioning: its agents run on the user's device rather than on a server platform, a point it explicitly ties to European sovereignty demands as companies look for alternatives that keep work closer to home.

Whether companions hold up beyond early adopters — and whether a Series A follows on the schedule Maddock sketched — is now the thing to watch. For now, 1.0 turns a year-long beta into a product anyone can try, and turns the browser tab bar into the latest front in the agent race.

Sources: Strawberry 1.0 release notes, Strawberry blog, Tech.eu, Retail Technology Innovation Hub.