Here’s your Monday dose of The F42 Brief.
📈 Trending Now
The one thing that’s making all the noise …. with a bit of fact checking.
💡Innovator Spotlight
Founders that are doing stuff differently.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Something useful to up your startups velocity.
📌 Note to Self
Stuff I constantly remind myself about, don’t want make the same mistakes again.
📈 Trending Now
Agentic AI will hand your team superpowers
Does it replace your workforce? No.
But it turns every employee into a force-multiplier by offloading the grind, tightening feedback loops and spotting patterns humans miss.
What Agentic really means
Standard “AI agents” are single-task bots. Agentic AI links a swarm of specialised agents plus an orchestrator that splits work, shares memory and replans when something breaks . It’s the shift from one virtuoso to a full orchestra.
Where the gains show up
Instant research drafts
A cluster of specialist agents (retriever, summariser, compliance-checker, formatter) now handles the grunt work of grant writing. Orchestrated together, they slash the time from blank page to polished proposal by automatically pulling past successful bids, scanning fresh literature and stitching everything into the right template—freeing academics to focus on the big ideas.
ICU-grade decision back-up
In critical-care pilots, diagnostic, history-retrieval and treatment-planning agents share a live memory space. They flag sepsis risks early, cross-check guidelines and surface options for the clinician—cutting cognitive load and speeding life-or-death calls without removing the human from the loop.
Ask your database, not your analyst
Plug Agentic AI into Power BI and anyone can type “How did Q3 compare with Q4 in the North-East?” The agent turns the question into SQL, runs the query and returns a chart or narrative, democratising insight and letting data teams spend time on harder problems.
Why it augments rather than replaces
Humans remain the escalation path. Orchestrators flag ambiguity, risk or conflict for sign-off rather than acting unilaterally .
Context still matters. Agents lack deep situational intuition—your people supply domain judgement and soft skills .
Governance is a human sport. Audit, compliance and ethical guardrails need policy decisions the swarm can’t invent .
Reality check
Error cascades amplify. One hallucination can ripple through the network if you skip validation layers .
Coordination isn’t “set-and-forget”. Natural-language APIs can deadlock; you’ll tune prompts and workflows like product features .
Security surface explodes. Compromise one agent, poison them all—segmentation and logging are non-negotiable .
Founder playbook
Frame the nerve, not the nervous system. Pick a high-value workflow (research, triage, scheduling) and add a three-agent pilot: doer, checker, orchestrator.
Instrument everything. Track autonomy %, rollback latency and error-spread before you brag about productivity.
Plug the swarm into your staff, not over them. Design hand-off points where humans can override, enrich or coach the agents.
Investor lens
Back teams with governance-first orchestration stacks and proprietary domain data. The defensive moat is how the swarm cooperates, not which LLM headlines the deck.
Here’s a plan
Document one end-to-end process this month. If a swarm can shoulder 70 % of the heavy lifting while your people make the final calls, prototype it—and watch your team’s capacity jump without a single redundancy notice.
💸 New Funds looking to give you cash
Look out for the The Raise Report this Wednesday, bring you all the new funds that have raised capital and looking to deploy.
💡Innovator Spotlight
Mushrooms, Packaging, and a Bit of Genius
Right, let’s have a proper look at something genuinely clever this month. Forget your usual tech startups for a moment-this one’s all about mushrooms. Yes, you read that right.
Meet Ecovative: The Fungi That’s Fixing Packaging
So, there’s this brilliant company called Ecovative, and they’ve basically decided that polystyrene and plastic are a bit passé. Instead, they’re growing packaging out of mycelium-the rooty bit of mushrooms. It’s not only smart, it’s properly eco-friendly. When you’re done with the packaging, chuck it in the compost and it’ll disappear in no time. No landfill, no fuss.
Why’s It So Brilliant?
Big Names On Board: IKEA and Dell are already using this stuff. If it’s good enough for flat-pack furniture and laptops, it’s good enough for the rest of us.
No Rubbish Left Behind: It’s fully compostable. No microplastics, no guilt trip.
More Than Just Boxes: They’re not stopping at packaging. These folks are growing everything from vegan bacon to sustainable leather. All thanks to mushrooms.
Words from the Wise
Co-founder Eben Bayer puts it simply: “If you want to change the world, you have to change what it’s made of.” Can’t argue with that, can you?
What’s the Takeaway?
If you’re a founder, maybe the next big idea isn’t another app or widget. Maybe it’s about looking at what’s already under our feet-literally. Ecovative proves that thinking a bit differently (and maybe getting your hands dirty) can shake up entire industries.
We are excited to announce our official partnership with GITEX EUROPE 2025—Europe’s Largest Inaugural Tech, Startup, and Digital Investment Event.
GITEX EUROPE 2025 is uniting the continent’s tech ecosystem with:
✔ 1,500+ exhibitors including AWS, IBM, SAP, Lenovo, Bosch and more.
✔ 950+ startups & 20+ unicorns pushing the boundaries of innovation.
✔ 500+ global thought leaders like the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton speaking
LIVE
Let’s shape Europe’s digital future together!
📅 May 21–23, 2025 📍 Berlin, Germany
🎟️ Limited seats available – secure yours now!
If you have not joined the Fusion42 Community on Telegram — A space for Founders, Framers, and Funders who show up to get **it done,
it is probably time to do so.
For the ❤️ of Startups
🛠️ Tools of the Week.
The Founder’s AI Ten-Pack
LangGraph – Open-source “brain wiring” for multi-agent workflows. Lets you design and debug the exact reasoning graph behind your product rather than praying a single prompt works. Great for anything mission-critical.
Flowise – Visual drag-and-drop builder for LLM and agent flows. Ideal when you need to mock up an internal tool or prototype a new feature before the sprint ends.
AutoGen – Microsoft-backed framework that lets multiple agents collaborate, argue and converge on the best answer. Perfect for complex tasks like code review + unit-test generation.
Glean Work AI – Enterprise-grade search that plugs into every SaaS app you use and actually finds the doc you meant. Saves teams hours hunting through Slack, Notion or Drive.
Perplexity Deep Research / Pages – Ask a hard question in plain English and get a fully sourced report or publish-ready page. Founder-friendly for market sizing, competitor scans and investor memos.
Runway Gen-3 – State-of-the-art video generation model; turn a text prompt into a 5-second product teaser or investor demo in minutes. Visual wow-factor without a motion-graphics hire.
ElevenLabs Voices – Low-latency, multilingual speech that doesn’t sound like a robot. Drop-in API for voice-notes, product tutorials or on-hold messages.
OpenPipe – Captures your expensive prompt-completion pairs, fine-tunes a custom model behind the scenes and slashes serving costs. Keeps you off the token-burn treadmill.
Rewind AI – Local “second brain” that records everything on your Mac and makes it instantly searchable. Brilliant for founders juggling rapid-fire meetings and lost snippets. Rewind
Fathom – Free meeting assistant that records, transcribes and summarises Zoom/Meet/Teams calls in 30 seconds flat, then syncs action items to your CRM. Goodbye note-taking fatigue.
📌 Note to Self
Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.
If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.
Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼
🛑 Get a different job.
Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update.
For the ❤️ of startups
✌🏼 & 💙
Derek