Charles Maddock: CEO at Strawberry Browser on building the browser of the future

0:00Charles Maddock:Hello and welcome to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Thank you so much for joining me. If you like what you see, please like, comment, subscribe. The more engagement, the more visibility, the better guests I can get and the better coverage I can provide of the European tech ecosystem. I would also like to say a huge thank you to my sponsors, Checkout.com, one of Europe's leading fintechs, and it is where the world checks out. And SurrealDB, the multimodal database for AI agent, which is partnered with thousands of the leading organizations, including the likes of NVIDIA and Samsung. So if you like both of those, check them out in the links below.

0:32Charles Maddock:Thank you very much. Hello and welcome back to Scaling Europe show. I am Seb Johnson. I'm here with Charles. Charles is the co-founder and CEO of Strawberry. Just raised a big round. One of the most exciting companies coming out of Stockholm at the moment. But can you give us a quick introduction, Charles? What have you built? Who you are? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Charles. I'm the CEO of Strawberry. I've been building AI agents and more specifically autonomous web agents since LLMs became first readily available with GPT 3.5. and it's always been a question of how can we help people do the most important work and automate the rest right and experimented with all kinds of interfaces throughout the years started to build up my team of the most intelligent cracked people I know experimented with chrome extensions browser SDKs all this stuff and now finally we have landed in our first real real amazing product I would say which is strawberry and strawberry is essentially a browser that the end user will download it looks kind of like arc if people have used that browser but it has the agentic power of it to like monos ai if you're familiar with that yeah and so how why was that the form or the product that you ended up with dude that's a great question we thought about this so much and we were always like oh do we need to build a browser do we need to build a browser like continuously really since day one.

2:02But I can start listing up the reasons. First of all, you have all the context, right? So when the user is doing something, their agent can kind of sit next to them and learn their workflow. So like, oh, hey, I've seen you do this thing twice now. Can I do it for you? Right? Most services have connectors to, for instance, Gmail and a connector to Google Drive. So they can see the documents there. But Strawberry can actually see that you took a receipt from Gmail, dragged it into Drive and that is like golden context, right? You can also migrate from your old browser. You get all of the context from that.

2:38It's an interface that we already spend 80 % of our day in, right? Unless you're non-technical. So you're super familiar with the interface. And I say the final big reason is that the agents we can create, they can just be parallelized super effectively. you can have 10 tabs running that each have their own agent doing different work in different web services. And of course, authentication is just solved automatically, right? So you don't need to have like a third party storage with passwords and off keys, it will just open a tab. And it's going to be logged into, for instance, LinkedIn, if you want to do outreach, or if you want to find influencers, you can do that on TikTok.

3:20And it's like, no brainer, anyone can do it, no need to code no need to learn any complex new systems and how are you thinking about the use cases so you

3:29Charles Maddock:know i know that you've got specific agents for like sales recruiting ops that kind of stuff what what what was your decision process to deciding which agents you wanted to build and what use cases they were going to solve for your users absolutely so the the idea with strawberry is that you actually create your own agents the reasons we have this official companions we call them, is to kind of make people start thinking what is possible, kind of in our messaging. But it's very, very easy to customize your own companions. And the idea with Strobe is that, of course, anything that you do inside the browser on a daily basis that is repetitive, takes lots of time, it makes you like all the tasks that make you feel like a robot.

4:13They should be done by a robot, right? And then you just teach these companions like, hey, go into this page, extract this information and put it into this CRM. Can you do that for me? And they will do that right in front of you. Right. So really, the mindset is quite easy to explain to even non-technical people. Just tell us what to do. It's going to open a tab and do the same flow that you would do. And the reason why we're kind of focusing on sales is because these are low hanging fruit. it's usually like prospect loads of leads check them against some icp document and then add them to a crm or and even reach out to them on linkedin right so it's like a low hanging fruit it's easier for us to do it's high value we can reach out to a lot of companies and we're just trying to find those high value low effort use cases and kind of pump them out to the masses got it yeah get people

5:06Charles Maddock:using those for those specific tasks and sort of build out from there um i want to talk about the fundraise you raised i think it was six million dollars um from some like really uh amazing investors how how did that round come about like what gave those investors the conviction to back you with that much cash well so it was actually um in like two installments you could say so initially we were building more of a developer toolkit that would allow developers to build web agents. And then, you know, the vision that immediately arose was we're starting to see this new internet where trillions of agents are communicating each second, sending more messages per minute than is done in an entire year today with humans, right?

5:53And it's transactions, it is decisions, it's all these things that will be happening. And how can humans kind of control this? So we built this tool for developers to start interfacing with the web with their agents. but then we realized at the beginning of this year well actually it's better to just go to the end user instead of the intermediate with the devs so we had already raised 2 million from our amazing amazing partners at EQT Ventures and then when we had built the browser and essentially mimicked what we were doing with the SDK but in a nicer interface the browser for non-technical users we released that on Product Hunt it instantly became number one product and that kind of triggered the next frenzy where investors wanted to get in.

6:41We got a lot of different offers and in the end, the partners we went with were the ones that seemingly had the best kind of understanding for the space and were the most excited about the product, had done good thesis around what we were doing, had checked out Manus and saw that we could actually do what Manus is doing but in an even more intuitive way for teams and ended up racing four from General Catalyst, along with, of course, the angels from Lovable, Hugging Face, and Superbiz.

7:16Charles Maddock:Amazing. And, you know, the launch was, or the announcement of the raise was massive. You know, I think it was like, you couldn't go on LinkedIn or X without seeing somebody talking about it, somebody, people like, either investors or like, yeah, everyone was just flooding socials with it. What has been the reaction since? So, you know, what did you see in terms of waitlists, signups, traction, all of that? Dude, it's kind of crazy. Strawberry is still a beta, right? Yeah. But pretty much everyone agrees that Strawberry is the most powerful AI browser by a long shot. Yeah. So you can start a task with Strawberry, like find all of the tech events in Stockholm and all of the speakers that participated at all these events.

7:58and Strawberry would just like spend an hour finding literally every single one and their LinkedIn's. Once you know, you will get like maybe 100 with the second best AI browser, Strawberry will get like 800. And so it's really marvelous AI, like bleeding edge agentic capabilities wrapped inside this beautiful browser. That's what people are saying essentially. And of course, we have people now who want to essentially use Strawberry as a full-time employee. So they are paying like a minimum wage per month to just run Strawberry constantly. And it makes sense, right? If it can do CIA level research on anything that is on the web, even if it's behind like a authentication wall, Strawberry can do it.

8:46Charles Maddock:That's amazing. Yeah, I mean, people have been so positive about it. I'm on the wait list, but I'm desperate to get it because so much of my work, some of it is so manual. You know, like I actually, I actually recently signed up to like a tool to help me with outbound messages on LinkedIn. You know, essentially, everyone who follows my page on LinkedIn for a long time, I was messaging every single person individually to say, hey, thank you for signing up. Like, you know, if you like this, sign up to my newsletters, watch my podcast, whatever. And so examples like that would be amazing. And similarly, I track all of my content, like every bit of content.

9:22Charles Maddock:I know exactly how well it does. but it's all so manual yeah um and i do all on my computer in my browser so i could i can i can really see the the use cases um where do you see this going you know like right now it's in beta it's very early you know you're focusing on sort of like solving a few key areas key use cases how big can this get like what does the future of agentic browsing look like in five ten years yeah i mean it's it's so exciting to be honest because we're really still at the beginning like we think we have progressed far but if you just put aside the the limitations with the models that are going to improve and it's going to get cheaper and faster there's so much to do on the ui ux front right like the chat interface is i would say the equivalent to the the terminal in the early computers you know when we invented computers we had terminals because that was like how typewriters work, right?

10:20And it was kind of a natural next step. Oh, let's make a digital typewriter. And it wasn't at all clear that we wanted Windows and a mouse and all of these applications. And it has to be the same with LLMs. So that's something we're working on a lot. Already we're starting to think about this with the companions, as you might have seen. We're trying to make the agents, we like avoid the word agent because it's so technical and like, you want to make them cute. You can easily understand them as a non-technical user. And, you know, as things grow, Strawberry will kind of be the interface towards the new internet, right?

11:05So the browsers today interfaced against HTTP. They load in websites so we can use them. But the future's internet will be agents communicating with each other, right? And it's going to be protocols like MCP, agent to agent you know generative ui all of these things and we'll have local models running on our devices and all of these questions we're going to tackle and if you download and you use strawberry you'll always be at the bleeding edge with like the nicest imaginable experience

11:35Charles Maddock:amazing you know it sounds phenomenal and and you know you mentioned that i guess like everybody's saying that that strawberry is is the best browser based you know ai based browser out there but that being said you know open ai released as a week ago two weeks ago yes what was that like for you and the team you know was it was it amazing to be able to go and try it and test it and feel validated that you're superior was it this like oh my god open ai released theirs you know what was your reaction what was the team's response i mean we we had known it was coming for a long long time There have been rumors since like the beginning of this year that they've been poaching people from Chrome.

12:16And so it wasn't really a surprise. I guess the thing we're kind of thinking about in the beginning was like, okay, well, how good is it actually going to be? Is it going to be like a DIA browser where it looks good, but it has kind of limited AI functionality? Or it's going to be super powerful, like same level as Strawberry? It was like somewhere kind of in between. so I actually think it's been great for us so far because it's opened up people's eyes to what an amazing interface the browser is and you know we don't need to spend loads of time educating people on why you should have an AI browser and people were kind of disappointed with Arc or sorry Atlas so they kind of saw Strawberry then and were like oh let me try this instead and were kind of blown away right But I'm sure we're going to keep innovating and being steps ahead of them over the coming few months.

13:15And yeah, we'll just see the best product. Let the best product win.

13:20Charles Maddock:Yeah, absolutely. That's super interesting. It's always acted as free marketing, right? They just help to grow your market and give you more customers, more visibility. Yeah. And I guess I would also say that like our intention here is not to build or innovate on the browser necessarily. I mean, really what you're getting with Strawberry is you're getting an intern, you're downloading an intern that can control the browser. And that's really what we're trying to get to, right? Give you this pleasant agent experience that is intuitive for everyone, even non-technical people. So you can start automating work at a large scale inside your team.

13:59and then over time start introducing these more non-traditional browser features right and and really rethink how how how the internet will look and function in the future yeah yeah

14:14Charles Maddock:it's going through this massive period of transition already but i think we've barely scratched the surface in terms of what's to come looking forward you know you've just raised you know the money that you've raised what do you need to do or achieve to get you to that next point where you can then raise the next round absolutely um i would say there are several uh things people expect a browser to have we still want strawberry to be a daily driver because that's when you can start to tap into all of that context the user can leverage what they're doing during the day and share it with their companions and their team.

14:55So certain things are still missing. An obvious one is Chrome extensions, which we will be implementing next week. And, you know, all of these shortcuts and small things people kind of expect and get really irritated at when they don't have them. We're going to fix all that. Obviously, costs and the time that it takes is a big thing people are concerned about with Strawberry right now. So working on getting that down. and then a few other like basic agentic features that like scheduling tasks, for instance, is something that no one else has, but that we of course want to have. You should be able to tell your companions, hey, every morning go to this new site and get like the recent events going on in the world and summarize them into a report.

15:44You know, these types of things. Yeah, a few other features we have in mind. And then once that is all done, we're ready to go completely open, general availability, open beta style.

15:59Charles Maddock:Got it. Okay. So there's a couple of product features that you want to release that you want to get right. You want to make it a bit faster. You want to make it a bit cheaper. And then when you hit those things, you're going to do more mass market approach. Anybody and everybody can come on board. And at that point, it's just about scaling. Absolutely. And at that point, we will have all of the case studies in place. So we're working with big companies now, saving them loads of loads of hours in different teams, recruiting teams, sales teams. You know, once we have these videos in place and just have it super clear, Strawberry is actually a tool for teams that want to automate work.

16:36It's not just a browser. And we have like much better onboarding that explains everything. you know it's it's it's it's a rocket that's ready to uh to launch at that point and how you

16:49Charles Maddock:i mean i know it's early now but how are you thinking about gtm are you thinking that this is going to be a tool primarily for b2b sales and you know get your uh yeah get your sales team on it to automate their task or are you thinking this has that big mass market adoption potential as well when you could get anyone who's browsing at any point to be using strawberry so i would say we're very similar to Notion and Slack where we would have product-led growth in the beginning. It's like a consumery product, right? Anyone can kind of get it for free, try it out, fall in love with it and then bring it to work.

17:21And eventually, you know, when you kind of reach the limits of what is possible with product-led growth, you would start looking at our database. Oh, okay, we see five people from this company using it. Let me call their CEO, tell them to get the enterprise plan.

17:38Charles Maddock:Yeah, absolutely. This is a super similar approach to Fixer AI. I had the CEO of Fixer AI on a few weeks ago. And it's similar in the sense that because it's such a great consumer focused product. Yes. You know, you get, you get your, you get everyday consumers using it. And then because it's so great, they just take it to work. And then when they're at work, it's like, you kind of get those network effects where they tell their colleagues and then, and then you're like, you say, they pick up the phone and they speak to the head of sales and then they do a big enterprise contract. Absolutely. So that's the plan.

18:05Charles Maddock:yeah there's yeah there's an amazing approach right because yeah so much of the value is so easy to understand as a as a usual consumer um i want to talk about like get some of your personal experiences you know you've been building operating for i guess a number of years now what's your experience been like on a personal level like what have been some of the hardest things that you've had to go through in kind of getting strawberries where it is today yeah that's a great question of course one of the big things is just the amount of time you need to spend and the time comes at a cost you can meet friends and family less often and I mean when you reflect on that it's really quite a big sacrifice that you're making and you don't really realize how obsessed you are and how pulled into a project you are until you take a day off and you think how long ago it was you actually met some of your best friends.

19:06So I would say that and then of course working that amount of time and locking your soul into what you're building and then in the beginning we're seeing less traction and it was just really hard to get the product out. you do get those days where you're like in bed and you're like I can't get up man I like you feel depressed right you're completely burnt out you feel depressed and nothing is going the way you want it but then you know you just get out of bed you go to work you might only get like three or four hours productive work but that's still a win and then you go back home you keep doing that and guess what eventually the universe throws you a bone and uh you you

19:53Charles Maddock:you get back into it no it's amazing yeah you just got to keep pushing even in those low moments right yeah but look charles we're out of time but um thank you so much for joining me and thank you for like the kind of open and kind of conversation it's um it's amazing to hear about the journey so far and i think it's going to be a huge success i'm going to be watching along every step of the way and if you've ever got news or milestones or things that you want to share let me know because yeah, I love covering the type of company that you're building, you know, an amazing, very exciting company that is transforming the way that people interact with technology.

20:25Thanks, man. Yeah, I'll definitely hit you up. Cool.

20:29Charles Maddock:Well, thanks very much, Charles, and let's stay in touch. Bye.