Strawberry, a Stockholm-based startup founded by former Spotify engineers, has launched an AI-native web browser that it claims fundamentally rethinks how people interact with the internet. Instead of typing URLs or search queries into an address bar, Strawberry's browser uses an integrated AI agent that can understand natural language requests, navigate websites autonomously, fill out forms, compare prices across tabs, and execute multi-step online tasks without requiring the user to manually click through each page.

Challenging Chrome is not a modest ambition. Google's browser holds roughly 65% of global market share and is integrated into an ecosystem that includes search, email, cloud storage, and the dominant mobile operating system. Strawberry's bet is that AI changes the competitive equation because the browser is no longer just a rendering engine for web pages. It becomes the interface between you and an AI agent that does your browsing for you. The same agentic AI trend reshaping B2B commerce is now coming for how you use the web.

Open Strawberry and the first thing you notice is what is missing. There is no traditional address bar. Instead, there is a chat-style input field at the top of the window where you describe what you want to do. Type something like 'find the cheapest flight from Stockholm to Berlin next Friday, economy class, flexible dates' and Strawberry's agent takes over. It opens relevant travel sites, enters your search parameters, compares results across multiple platforms, and presents a summary with booking links.

The technology behind this is a combination of a fine-tuned large language model for understanding intent, a web interaction engine that can parse and interact with arbitrary websites, and a task planning system that breaks complex requests into sequences of browser actions. The browser renders pages in the background while the agent works, so you can watch the process or switch to other tasks and come back when the agent has results.

The more interesting use cases go beyond simple search. Strawberry can monitor a web page for changes and alert you when a product comes back in stock. It can fill out complex multi-page forms by pulling your information from a secure local vault. It can read lengthy articles or documentation and provide summaries. It can compare product specifications across retailer websites and present the comparison in a structured table without you visiting a single product page.

Strawberry's founding team reads like a Spotify alumni reunion. CEO Erik Lindgren led Spotify's recommendation engineering team. CTO Anna Bergstrom built Spotify's internal search infrastructure. Head of product Jonas Ekman ran Spotify's desktop app redesign. The team left Spotify over the course of 2024 and began building Strawberry in early 2025.

The company has raised $12 million in seed funding from EQT Ventures and Creandum, along with a group of angel investors that includes Spotify's former CTO and several prominent Swedish tech founders. The funding is substantial for a European seed round and reflects both the pedigree of the team and the scale of the market opportunity if the product works.

The Spotify connection is not just biographical. The founding team argues that Spotify solved a similar problem in music: it replaced the manual process of finding, evaluating, and selecting songs with an AI-driven system that understood your preferences and presented what you wanted. Strawberry aims to do the same for web browsing. Instead of you navigating the web, the web gets navigated for you, with the AI learning your preferences, habits, and needs over time.

Strawberry enters a market that is suddenly crowded. The idea that AI will reshape the browser has attracted multiple well-funded competitors, each with a slightly different approach to the same fundamental thesis: the traditional browser interface is a relic of the pre-AI era.

The table tells you the competitive challenge clearly. Strawberry is not just competing against other startups. It is competing against Google and Microsoft, both of which are integrating AI capabilities into browsers that already have billions of users. The argument for a new browser has to be that bolt-on AI features in an existing browser are fundamentally worse than a browser built from scratch around AI capabilities. Sweden's broader AI ecosystem, despite government underfunding concerns, continues to produce ambitious consumer tech plays.

Chrome's dominance is not just about features. It is about the ecosystem lock-in that makes switching browsers genuinely painful for most users. Your saved passwords, bookmarks, browsing history, extensions, and autofill data live in Chrome. Your Google account ties your browser to your email, calendar, documents, and photos. Leaving Chrome means leaving that integration, and most people will not do it for marginal improvements.

Strawberry's counter-argument is that AI-native browsing is not a marginal improvement. It is a category shift. If the browser can reliably do things for you that previously required 15 minutes of manual clicking and typing, the value proposition is not better tabs or a cleaner interface. It is getting time back. The company's early user data from its closed beta suggests that active users complete certain web tasks 60-70% faster with the AI agent than through traditional browsing.

The privacy question is also central. Strawberry's agent needs to see what you are browsing, understand your preferences, and access your form data to be useful. The company says all agent processing happens locally on the user's device, with no browsing data sent to external servers. Strawberry is betting that privacy-conscious European users, protected by the EU's Digital Markets Act, will prefer a less capable local agent to a more capable cloud agent that sends their browsing data to Google or Microsoft.

Sweden has produced world-class consumer technology companies. Spotify, Skype, and King were all built in Stockholm and reached global scale. But a browser is a different kind of product. It is the most fundamental piece of software on any computer, and the competitive dynamics are dominated by platform owners who can bundle and default their browsers in ways that startups cannot match.

Strawberry's go-to-market strategy focuses on three beachheads. First, power users in the tech and knowledge work segments who spend hours daily on complex web tasks and will pay for efficiency. Second, the European market, where privacy sensitivity is higher and regulatory action against Google's browser dominance is creating opportunities for alternatives. Third, enterprise deployments where the AI agent can automate repetitive web-based workflows like procurement, research, and data entry.

Whether Strawberry can actually challenge Chrome's dominance is probably the wrong question at this stage. The more relevant question is whether it can build a sustainable business as a premium AI browser for users who value efficiency and privacy over ecosystem integration. That is a smaller market than Chrome's, but it is a market that did not exist two years ago and is growing fast. If Strawberry can own even a meaningful slice of it, the challenge to Chrome will take care of itself over time.