Thomas Fraher: Building AI You Can See and Steer

Handing a task to AI can mean giving up sight of the process. Thomas Fraher is building around a different premise: people should be able to see what an agent is doing and intervene while it works.

With Novastart, the company he co-founded with Nick Fraher, Thomas describes a shared visual workspace where familiar applications and AI agents occupy the same canvas.

The ambition is not simply to make the computer do more. It is to keep the person using it in the picture.

A workspace you can zoom out from

Thomas calls Novastart an “infinite-canvas operating system.” In his description, apps, websites, and documents become windows on a single zoomable canvas. Gmail, Excel, WhatsApp, and Notion are among the tools he names in his Featured Founders submission.

AI agents work in those applications with their own visible cursors. A person can watch, pause, correct, or take over.

That distinction matters. Asking an agent to complete something is one interaction. Being able to follow its actions and change direction along the way is another.

Built for the people between applications

Founders and small teams rarely spend their whole day inside one tool. Conversations, documents, decisions, and follow-ups happen across a collection of applications.

That is the audience Thomas has in mind. Rather than treating movement between tools as an exception, Novastart’s premise starts there.

“Founders and small teams who live in many apps at once are exactly who we built it for.”

Thomas and Nick founded the bootstrapped company in 2025. Thomas leads product and engineering. In his submission, he reports an August 2026 launch and a free plan.

Those details describe an early-stage product with a specific direction, not a promise that every workflow can already be handed over to an agent. The interesting question is how that direction changes the relationship between a person, their tools, and the work in front of them.

A founder returning to the work of building

Novastart is not Thomas’s first company. His supplied biography describes his earlier experience co-founding and running Aquavoss, an at-home health and wellness company that sold in November 2025. It also records a B.A. in Economics from Yale in 2019.

Today, his focus is product and engineering at Novastart. The common thread worth exploring is not a claim that one venture guarantees the next. It is the decision to return to building, this time around a question about how people should work alongside AI.

Speed is part of the wider AI conversation. Thomas’s emphasis adds another consideration: visibility. Before a person can meaningfully intervene, they need to understand what is happening.

Danel Hommeus

Founder, DaHo Creative Hub · MSC

Building systems, brands, and businesses — one decision at a time.

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