Furze MVP Announcement: May 25
We started developing our AI-native platform "Furze" in early incarnations going back to early 2025 — prototyping, testing, validating, solving for what AI can really do and what it can't. That seems like a long time ago. It's been a moving buffet, though, with changes in AI, methodology, client feedback — you name it, it's probably happened.
But the time has arrived, our tech product Furze has arrived as an MVP and in beta from today.
Hundreds of hours of validation, product specs, claude-coding, many thousands of lines of code, design meetings, client testing and documentation developed.
We can say that we are now on the map.
The problem Furze solves
For many years developing strategies for growth has largely been about incremental low risk formations. Adding additional sales resource = more sales. Need to get a bigger slice of the pie, then expand your footprint. But these strategies eventually and almost always run out of road.
But the other side of the problem is that this approach is mechanistic, when you pull one lever you expect to get that outcome. i.e. add more salespeople then get more sales. But there are countless examples where this never worked and it wasn’t because the lever was the wrong one. It was because it didn’t take account of what was happening in their wider system.
There are many cases like this. Blockbuster sticking to their old business model whilst Netflix arrived and changed the consumer demand landscape. Kodak not becoming a digital business whilst film cameras sales fell in front of their eyes. These are two obviously known companies that collapsed because they didn’t look at their wider system and what was changing around them.
If you can appreciate your organisational capabilities, understand your markets and their relationships you can find new ways to grow in entirely novel ways. If Blockbuster had seen that Netflix was on the horizon and changing the model to which consumers received dvds in the post they could have flipped much more quickly and saved the company. Or even better, they could have beat Netflix to their own strategy, they had the capability and infrastructure. Just not the strategy and vision to execute it.
This is the problem that Furze solves for. Building entirely new growth strategies with a systems thinking lens, this is the different perspective it brings.
Building data around markets and the relationships between them creates novel and wholly new ways to see a different path.
And just to wrap up the example, Netflix obviously figured this out before blockbuster did, because they don’t post dvds through your door anymore. But what are they going to do next in a now saturated subscription streaming market?
Furze will show us new ways to look at their next move.
The product promise: what it delivers
Reveal
What an organisation’s capability and potential really is. Proximity hides what they’re truly great at. Furze creates high-fidelity assets around any business model in minutes.
Map
Market datasets on anything in the world — from semiconductor makers in Asia to flip-flop makers in Peru. Built around your needs and use cases, delivered at any scale.
Surface
The relationships linking a market together. Who supplies, owns, invests in, and regulates whom. The links between organisations are what bring systems thinking to the surface — thousands mapped in minutes.
Build
Convert every insight above into new strategic growth scenarios with different risk profiles. Not which lever to pull, but how to influence a systemic outcome — and, just as importantly, what you shouldn’t do.
What’s next?
The obvious point is that an MVP is what it is. We’ve still got much further to go until it becomes the fully fledged v1 product. Of which our full roadmap will continue all the way till the start of 2027.
Across May and June, we will continue to share more about Furze and its capability. We’ll be making a series of public releases on the functionality of Furze and showing the product platform we have proudly built. Real video demos, showcasing its capability in action. Keep an eye for our forthcoming LinkedIn posts!
If you’d like to talk more about Furze and its promise, then feel free to get in touch rob@firehills.io
Till next month.
Rob and the Firehills Team
