The browser that works while you watch
Strawberry is a browser with built-in AI companions that take real work off your hands. The companions learn your preferences and workflows, then work inside the accounts you are already signed into — researching, clicking, typing and summarising on your behalf. The pitch is deliberately unglamorous: not a smarter chatbot, but hours of work done in minutes, in the place where knowledge workers already spend their day.
The insight behind it, as seed investor General Catalyst put it, is that the browser already holds most of a user's context — browsing history, saved passwords, signed-in sessions — and most people would like help automating work inside the browser without sharing their logins and other information with a third-party agent. Strawberry's answer is to bring the agent to the context instead of the context to the agent.
Version 1.0 is the moment that idea leaves its invite-only phase. A year ago, you needed an invite code to try Strawberry. Since then, the team says, it has become faster, steadier, and able to take on far more of your work — and almost every feature in 1.0 started as something a user asked for or pushed the team on.
Coding at ten, a game studio in his teens
Strawberry's founder, Charles Maddock, started coding at the age of ten and co-founded a game development studio in his teens. General Catalyst, which led Strawberry's seed round, describes him as electrifying, with a deep urge to create, remarkable product intuition, and an ability to inspire and attract top-tier talent. Alongside co-founders Sebastian Thunman and Arian Hanifi — the company's CTO — he has built a core team of engineers in Stockholm around a product meant to make AI both accessible and practical for everyday knowledge work.
Before Strawberry became his full-time focus, Maddock spent a short stint at Lovable, the AI development platform. In a later interview he described that detour as formative despite its brevity: it showed him how AI tools could accelerate software development, and it catalysed a decision to pursue Strawberry with renewed focus — including a move to the United States as the company shifted from refining the product to scaling it.
A beta that won the week, then a year of listening
When Maddock launched a beta of Strawberry on Product Hunt in April, it quickly became both Product of the Day and Product of the Week — an early signal that the idea of a browser that does the work, rather than a chatbot that talks about it, resonated beyond the usual early-adopter crowd.
The year that followed was quieter by design. Strawberry spent it in closed testing, opening to everyone in an open beta after that year, with a personalised onboarding process that maps a user's role and workflow and, with consent, builds a profile to suggest relevant tasks. In its own tests at the time, the company said the browser outperformed competing AI tools, including Perplexity's Comet and OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas, in practical workflows, and scored around 78% on the GAIA agent benchmark. Strawberry is free to download and try, with full access at $20 a month.
What 1.0 actually changes
The 1.0 release is less about new capabilities than about making companions feel like teammates. Every companion gets a new look, and you decide what it is: pick a colour, try faces until one feels right, or hit randomise. If you want a head start, you can hire one of nine ready-made companions — Sales Sally for lead generation, Talent Theo among them — each arriving knowing its job, with the skills and routines for it, and spending its first chat learning how you work.
Then there is Companion Plaza, the release's playful centrepiece. Select it in the corner of a new tab and your companions come out to hang around the chat input: they wander, stop to 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 your pointer over a head for a headpat. Between jobs, your companions finally have somewhere to hang out.
Underneath the playfulness, the control stays strict. Each companion requests approval before taking key actions, keeping privacy and precision in the user's hands — the condition that makes delegating real work to a browser feel safe rather than reckless.
Why the browser, why now
The bet Strawberry is making is that AI's next interface is not a new app but the one everyone already uses. Chatbots ask you to bring your work to them; a browser with companions meets the work where it lives, inside the tabs, accounts and workflows of an ordinary day. If that bet is right, the prize is not a better chat window but the hours of digital busywork — the research, the outreach, the inbox, the cross-tab gathering — that knowledge workers currently pay for with their attention.
Maddock's arc, from a ten-year-old coder to a teenage game-studio founder to a founder rebuilding the browser, fits that bet: a builder who has always made things where people already are. Strawberry 1.0 does not claim the work is finished. It claims, after a year of listening, that the companions are finally ready to be hired — and that they should be judged not on how cleverly they talk, but on how much of your day they hand back.
The playbook
- Build where the work already happens — Most AI tools live in a chat window, away from where users actually work. Strawberry puts companions inside the browser, where history, passwords and signed-in accounts already live — so the assistant can act without asking users to hand logins to a third party.
- Let the product earn its freedom gradually — Companions ask for approval before key actions. For an agent that clicks, types and spends attention on your behalf, trust is granted in small steps — and the approval gate is what makes the autonomy acceptable.
- Ship the beta in public, then listen for a year — The April Product Hunt beta won Product of the Day and Product of the Week. Strawberry spent the year after it in closed testing and user feedback before opening up — and says almost every 1.0 feature started as something a user asked for.
- Give the agent a face — In 1.0 every companion gets a look you choose — colour, face, randomised if you like — and a place to hang out, Companion Plaza. Personality is not decoration here; it is how a tool you delegate to becomes a teammate you recognise.