Swedish startup Strawberry launches AI agent platform 1.0 built around shared "AI companions"

Strawberry, a Stockholm-based startup, has launched version 1.0 of an AI agent platform aimed at non-technical teams such as sales, recruiting, customer support and marketing. The product is free to try, and Retail Technology Innovation Hub reported the launch on 26 October.

The company has raised $6 million from EQT and General Catalyst, and it plans to follow the 1.0 launch with a Series A funding round. A first shipped product paired with the next fundraise makes this an early test of whether demo-stage interest can turn into paid deployments.

The central concept is what Strawberry calls AI companions: users and teams create their own virtual colleagues. According to the company, companions differ from chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT, which take a prompt and complete a task; companions are meant to work alongside people inside existing workflows rather than instead of them.

Technically, the platform runs in the browser, the place where a team's context, workflows and logins already live. A companion is connected to that context, remembers how the team works, and improves the longer it works alongside them.

"The technology is already here: agents can now work for weeks in a row," said Charles Maddock, CEO and co-founder at Strawberry. "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."

Yuri Sagalov, a partner at General Catalyst, framed the product as a distribution shift. "Today the person who is great with Claude keeps all of it on their own laptop," he said. "In Strawberry you train a companion once, and everyone on the team gets it, with everything it has learned." He added that the browser is fast becoming the front line for AI.

The signal here is less about model capability than about organisational adoption. Enterprise agents have moved from "can it be done" to "will the team actually use it", and turning individual prompt craft into a shared, persistent team asset is one answer to that gap.

What to watch next: the size and investors of the Series A, which industries the first paying teams come from, and how shared companion memory inside a browser is governed when permissions and sensitive logins are involved. Those details will decide whether "AI colleagues" become part of everyday enterprise workflows.