When Simon Beverton lost his corporate bank job in 2016, he didn’t move to a bigger city or join another company.
Instead, he stayed in Bloomington and built his own. “I was working for a big bank remotely here in Bloomington,” he said. “And after I got laid off, I was able to find two different clients in the financial world, and so I started. It was just me back in 2016.”
That decision—to stay, to start small, to keep creating—would become the foundation for Future Wonder, a full digital design and development agency now rooted at The Mill. Nearly a decade later, Simon and his team have worked with dozens of startups and businesses across Indiana to bring new ideas to life. Through the Indiana Technical Assistance Program (INTAP), they’ve helped founders turn grants into growth.
“We’ve done 48 of those projects for 35 unique clients, most of them startups, since that program started in 2018,” he said.
Simon sees Future Wonder and The Mill as closely connected, with each benefiting from the other’s growth.
“There are people working for established businesses there,” he explained. “There are people working for other startups who have been there for five years. There are defense, you know, startups and companies there. So there’s a real melting pot.”
As technology evolves, Future Wonder is leaning into artificial intelligence with the same curiosity and care that has guided its work from the start. This year, the team launched Charioteering, an experimental internship program that integrates generative AI into real-world development work.
“The idea is to use not one model, but five models, eventually 10 models, 100 models, to try and get around the problems of generative AI, which means it can be wrong,” Simon said. “It can hallucinate.”
The goal isn’t to automate developers out of the process, but to elevate their craft. “We don’t consider what we do vibe coding because we are all developers and we kind of are trained in that field,” he said. “We’re doing AI-assisted coding.”
At Future Wonder, innovation is as much about reflection as it is about speed—building with new tools while keeping human insight at the center.
Outside of work, Simon finds inspiration in the creative pulse of Bloomington itself.
“You’ve got theatrical and performance and art, like, you know, culture here,” he said. “The festival culture seems to be back now after the pandemic, so that’s good. It’s definitely not boring. It’s not flat.”
Future Wonder’s journey mirrors Bloomington’s own evolution: collaborative, experimental, and deeply human.
As technology continues to change, Simon and his team are proving that innovation grows strongest in community—where people share ideas, take risks, and build something better together.