The United States attracted nearly $286 billion in private artificial intelligence investment in 2025, but only 15% of U.S. employees used AI daily in their jobs as of May 2026. Swedish startup Strawberry aims to help close that adoption gap by bringing AI companions directly into the browser where people already work, rather than requiring them to learn complex tools or repeatedly explain their tasks to chatbots.
The startup announced the launch of version 1.0 on Monday, aiming to make AI more accessible to nontechnical teams without requiring them to learn complex tools or repeatedly explain their jobs to chatbots.
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According to a company release, Strawberry is free to try and allows individuals and teams to create virtual colleagues called AI companions. Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, which typically respond to prompts to complete specific tasks, Strawberry’s companions are designed to work alongside employees and adapt to their workflows.
The company says its browser-based approach sets it apart because employees’ work context, workflows and logins are already available in the browser. Companions can learn how a team operates and improve as they work with users, drawing on that context to assist with everyday tasks.
“The technology is already here: agents can now work for weeks in a row. Yet, we see so many companies struggle with adoption. We built a product so delightful that teams adopt it naturally, with companions you bring into your team like colleagues,” said Charles Maddock, Strawberry’s CEO and co-founder, in an interview with The American Bazaar.
Strawberry has received $6 million in funding from EQT and General Catalyst, with angel investors including the founders of Lovable, Supabase and Hugging Face, according to the company. Its browser is designed for nontechnical teams working in sales, recruiting, customer support and marketing. It is available for macOS and Windows.
The company was founded by Maddock, chief operating officer Sebastian Thunman and chief technology officer Arian Hanifi.
Laurits Wehding, Strawberry’s founding operator, said many AI products remain too complex for everyday business users, despite rapid advances in the technology.
“The AI landscape is moving insanely fast, and a lot of products today are quite complex. They are built by engineers and mainly for engineers, but more products are now emerging to cater to a broader audience,” Wehding told The American Bazaar.
He described the market as spanning simple AI assistants that operate through messaging-style interfaces and more advanced coding tools that require technical expertise.
On one end, assistants such as Muse, Instinct, Grokbot and Dots operate through interfaces similar to iMessage, disconnected from users’ everyday work, Wehding said. He argued that users may need to repeatedly explain their jobs to these assistants and that some tools face limitations when interacting with websites such as LinkedIn.
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On the other end are tools such as Claude Code and Codex, which Wehding described as powerful but too complex for many salespeople, marketing interns and other nontechnical employees.
“Strawberry sits in the middle,” he said. “Instead of users having to adapt to AI or sit in the prompt box and explain their whole job, they can just sit where they work in the browser and do their work normally and have agents watch over their shoulder.”
The companions can learn users’ communication styles, decision-making processes and work habits, Wehding said, with the aim of making AI assistance feel more like collaborating with a colleague than operating a separate tool.