What is Strawberry, and why is everyone talking about it?
Strawberry is a web browser with AI assistants built in. You browse as usual, and the assistants, which Strawberry calls companions, do work for you on the same websites. The team, based in Stockholm, released version 1.0 on 26 October. On Product Hunt, the site where new tech products are voted on every day, it reached #1 of the day. It runs on Mac and Windows.
What could it do for a business or a public office?
According to the company's site and release notes, a companion learns how you work and can take on jobs like these.
- Sales research. Ask it to research 200 target companies and you get one finished spreadsheet back, says co-founder Charles Maddock on Product Hunt.
- Meeting notes. It records Google Meet, Zoom and Teams calls without a bot joining, then writes the summary and the action items.
- Routines. It works on a schedule or when something happens. Think of a summary of your inbox at 9, or a draft reply when a client writes.
There is a free plan with 500 credits a month, and paid plans start at $20 a month, according to Strawberry's price list. Credits are spent only when a companion works, not when you browse.
What doesn't it settle for you?
On Product Hunt the team says a companion always asks before it sends anything. The site describes a more flexible rule. You choose, app by app and action by action, what a companion may do without asking. Control exists, but someone in your company has to set it.
Our read: the question goes beyond Strawberry and covers any agent working in a browser. A BleepingComputer piece, sponsored by the security company Keep Aware, makes a simple point. The agent acts with the employee's logins. So a company application, and its logs, may record the agent's actions as if the employee had done them. It also warns about prompt injection, meaning instructions hidden in a page or an email that try to steer the agent.
Hayete Gallot, who leads Microsoft Security, calls these agents agentic insiders. In her words they are often overprivileged, with data, tools and systems within reach, as she wrote on Microsoft's blog.
Then there is the data. Strawberry's privacy policy says the company holds a SOC 2 Type II report, an independent audit of its security controls. Business customers can ask for it. The same policy says personal data is processed in the EU and in the United States. Your content may also be sent to outside AI providers. On Product Hunt the team speaks of EU data residency, so check what your contract says.
What about us?
How we would use it: take a sales office that researches prospects before sending quotes. We would try a companion on that task alone. It would get a separate browser profile, signed in only to the accounts it needs. Every email and every CRM change would be set to ask first.
Suppose the job then has to write into your management software and keep its own log. At that point an agent with its own identity, connected to your systems, does it better. That is the work of our AI agents and automation service.
Should you try it or wait?
- If your team does repetitive research on public websites, try it on one task, with a separate profile and no access to sensitive accounts.
- If the agent would open email, the CRM or the bank with your logins, first decide what it may do without asking and how you will tell its actions from yours.
- If the work touches customers' or citizens' personal data, read the contract and the data processing terms before you install it, not after.
“An agent in your browser is a colleague holding your keys. Decide what it can open before you decide what it can do.”
DBrothers — how we design agents with permissions
Before you install a browser with agents in your company, let's check together which accounts and sessions it would reach.
