Agents

Strawberry: Sweden’s A.I. Browser Tries What OpenAI and Perplexity Couldn’t

co-produced by AI27. Oktober 2026, 08:30

The three founders of the Swedish A.I. browser start-up Strawberry — The Strawberry founders Charles Maddock, Sebastian Thunman and Arian Hanifi. © Strawberry

Brave or reckless? The Stockholm start-up Strawberry is launching an A.I. browser just as the biggest names in the industry are scrapping their own browser experiments one after another. After roughly a year in beta, Strawberry released version 1.0 on Monday and is positioning itself as an A.I. alternative for businesses.

Agents as ‘Colleagues’

The idea is to let A.I. work directly inside the browser so that employees without coding skills can build their own agents. Strawberry calls these agents “companions.” They are meant to handle typical business tasks in sales, recruiting, customer support and marketing. The company also offers ready-made agents that learn how the rest of the business works and share their output with the whole team.

According to Strawberry, a browser is the natural home for this because it is where a team’s context, workflows and logins already live. “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,” said Charles Maddock, the chief executive. “The technology is already here: agents can now work for weeks in a row.”

What Strawberry promises:

Model-agnostic: Strawberry is not tied to a single A.I. model and can work with various large language models.
Integrations: The company says it connects to more than 3,000 other apps.
Automation: Agents can run on a schedule and collaborate with other agents.
Office tasks: Companions can create presentations in a company’s branding and record meetings without a bot joining the call.
Local instead of cloud: The agents run on the user’s device, which Strawberry pitches as an answer to Europe’s growing demand for digital sovereignty.

Screenshot of Strawberry 1.0 with an A.I. companion searching LinkedIn for leads — Strawberry 1.0: A companion searches LinkedIn for sales leads directly in the browser. © Strawberry

Lovable as a Customer, General Catalyst as an Investor

Customers include the Swedish vibe-coding unicorn Lovable, which uses Strawberry to source engineers, and the health start-up Tandem Health. Early users have also built assistants for sales prospecting. Strawberry declined to share user or revenue numbers when asked by Trending Topics.

Pricing is tiered by credit usage:

Free: a basic version at no cost.
Entry: $20 (about €17.84) a month.
Mid-tier: $85 (about €75.84) a month.
Top tier: $250 (about €223.05) a month.

Strawberry was founded in 2023 by Charles Maddock (chief executive), Sebastian Thunman (chief operating officer) and Arian Hanifi (chief technology officer). Mr. Maddock, in his mid-twenties, already has an exit behind him after founding and selling a climate tech start-up. The team currently numbers 12. A year ago, Strawberry raised a $6 million (about €5.35 million) seed round led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures, with participation from the founders of Lovable, Supabase and Hugging Face. Mr. Maddock said the company would raise a Series A once it scales the product across Europe and the U.S.

The Browser Flops of the Big Players

Strawberry is entering a field that so far has mostly produced failures:

OpenAI: The ChatGPT maker launched its ChatGPT Atlas browser with great fanfare a year ago as a challenge to Google Chrome. By the summer, OpenAI announced it was shutting Atlas down. Since August, Atlas has been gone as a standalone browser.
Perplexity: Its A.I. browser Comet shot up to No. 3 in the App Store this spring after becoming free on iOS, then dropped out of the charts again. It was plagued by crashes, security researchers repeatedly showed how the agent could be hijacked through prompt injection, and a U.S. court barred Comet from making automated purchases on Amazon.
Arc: The Browser Company stopped active development of its much-hyped Arc browser in 2025 to focus on its A.I. browser Dia and was later acquired by Atlassian. Last week came the final blow: Arc will be shut down shortly before Christmas, and users are being told to switch to Dia.

The A.I. companies have since moved the browser technology into their own apps. OpenAI folded Atlas into its new ChatGPT desktop app, a kind of superapp that bundles chat, Codex and agents. Anthropic has given the Claude desktop app a built-in browser for Cowork. For A.I. agents, the browser is a key building block: It is where they can act on the web on the user’s behalf, sign in with the user’s logins, fill out forms and pull data from portals that have no interface for software.

On top of that, Google has long been upgrading Chrome with Gemini agents, reaching billions of users directly.

The Competition

That is why Mr. Maddock does not want to be compared with other A.I. browsers. “I would say that we compete much more with the big agent platforms like Claude, ChatGPT, Grok Bot and Gemini,” he said. And those platforms are arming up fast: Anthropic, for example, recently unveiled Claude Duet, a new A.I. agent that takes on Meta’s Muse, Grok Bot and Dots.

This is also where Strawberry’s risk lies. As a model-agnostic platform, the start-up depends on the language models of the very companies it competes with. Start-ups that mainly resell the computing power of big A.I. providers risk becoming victims of the pricing power of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Strawberry sees its moat in the context teams build up over time, in running locally and in getting employees without technical skills to actually use agents.