Adclear is building the future of automated compliance for financial services.
Outward recently led Adclear’s £2.1m funding round – you can read about our investment thesis here.
Founded by three friends with deep roots in finance, engineering and product, the team has moved fast from a kitchen table idea to signing major financial institutions. We sat down with cofounders Doni Hoti, Joe Jordan and Cameron Ward to talk about the experiences that shaped them, the early moments that made Adclear real, and the values driving the company forward.
1. Why does the world need Adclear?
Joe
A lot of repetitive manual work still happens in compliance. It’s necessary work, but it stops experts from focusing on the more nuanced, strategic cases. I have a family member in regulation who told me that over her thirty-year career, about 40% of her work was repetitive. That always stuck with me. If we can free people up to focus on the high value work, the whole industry benefits.
2. What strengths does each of you bring to the table?
Joe on Doni
Doni’s speed of execution and problem solving are incredible. His mentality is always “how”, not “if”.
Cameron on Doni
I would also add Doni’s strength when it comes to sales and people. He can win anyone over.
Joe on Cameron
Cam is thoughtful, detailed and calm, with consistently high-quality work. He’s a perfectionist when it matters, but he also knows when to move fast. It’s the ultimate balance.
Doni on Cameron
We call Cam the Rolls Royce, everything he touches is high quality and reliable. And he solves everything.
Cameron on Joe
Joe is the organiser of Adclear. If you don’t hear about something, it’s because he’s already sorted it. He handles fundraising, finances, sales, product and more. He wears a lot of hats and keeps the whole thing running.
Doni on Joe
Joe also makes being a founder feel effortless, because almost all the most painful things are quietly being done by him alongside all the other things he does. He’s like the Sergio Busquets of the co-founding team.
3. What are the pros and cons to starting a business with your friends?
Cameron
One big pro is that we can be brutally honest with each other. If something isn’t good, we just say it. That helped us move really fast early on. Prior to starting Adclear, we spent a lot of time on the football pitch, we’re all very competitive and we learnt early on that we have a similar drive and work ethic.
Joe
We also have similar values: transparency, honesty, directness. And we genuinely think the others are better than ourselves, which sets a high bar and creates a lot of respect. On the downside, Adclear dominates our relationship now. We don’t do much outside of it. We need to do a better job of being friends as well as founders.
4. What personal experiences have shaped the course of your lives?
Doni
My parents run a small family restaurant. In the process of setting it up, they were close to bankruptcy and needed to return to Kosovo to deal with family issues. My brother and I, aged 20 and 17 at the time, were left in charge to get the restaurant opened. We had no money, little guidance from our parents and the emotional burden of trying to find a way to get it done. We had to build things ourselves, convince people to help us for free whilst working on an extra loan from the bank. We got there in the end, and it taught me an important lesson: no matter how low you find yourself, there is always a way to make things work. There is always a way up. That’s a mindset I carry into Adclear every day.
Joe
That’s a tough act to follow… At university I started my first proper company. I found out there was a small grant scheme at Loughborough, so a friend and I built a student job platform. Seeing that you could take a small amount of capital, turn it into something useful for people, and actually make money from it had a huge impact. That experience shaped what I wanted to do after uni and drove me towards founding Adclear.
Cameron
A bit of a boring answer but I’d say my first job out of university. The company was a mix of cybersecurity, aerospace and cloud infrastructure. My degree was in aerospace, I was a self-taught programmer, and they took a bit of a chance on me. During this time, I got the bug for startups and software engineering. I stayed for three years, and I still lean on that experience when making decisions at Adclear. A lot of how we work today comes from what I learned in that first role.
5. How would you describe your culture?
Cameron
We talk a lot about the “how not if” mentality. Whatever the problem is, we’ll figure out how to solve it. That applies across the whole team.
Joe
Yeah, and we try to build a culture of momentum and winning. Signing customers, fundraising, new hires, product releases. If things keep happening and we keep moving, that builds belief. Speed leads to success. And success builds a winning mentality.
6. As builders in AI, what do you think is most misunderstood?
Cameron
A big misconception is that if you have huge context windows you should just throw loads of information at the model and let it handle everything. What we’ve learned is the opposite. Less is more. If you give the model the minimum information needed to solve the problem, it performs better and more consistently.
7. If you could bring anyone onto your board as an advisor, who would it be?
Joe
Sir Alex Ferguson. His ability to build teams, manage people and create a winning culture for decades is something I’d love to learn from. If we want to build a generational company, we need a team that always performs, and he’s mastered that.
Cameron
For me it would be one of the Linear cofounders. Linear is the pinnacle of a software company: polished product, incredible engineering culture, very high standards. There’s a lot to learn from how they build.
Doni
Lee Kuan Yew. He took Singapore from a struggling nation to a world power. That type of underdog energy, combined with a never-say-die mentality alongside an ability to not only be an elite operator but instil that belief in a whole nation, that’s truly impressive.
8. What’s a moment that stands out since founding Adclear?
Doni
For me, it was when we signed our first client, Plum. I had quit my job to go full time, but Adclear still didn’t feel like a real company. We didn’t have a fully working product and everything felt like a dream. When the signed contract came through, that changed everything. Adclear became a reality.
I remember sitting at my living room table looking at the signature and wanting to throw my laptop in the air. Then I realised we had no funding yet and no one would replace the laptop if I broke it.
Cameron
Probably releasing version two of Adclear. Doni was full time by then, whilst Joe and I were working other jobs. We’d finish our day jobs, go straight to a coworking space and work as a team into the night. We had six weeks to ship the product and get it to a level where we were confident to show it to enterprise clients. That period was intense, but it accelerated Adclear to the next stage.
Joe
The moment one of our biggest ICP targets reached out to schedule a follow up meeting. Four months post the pre-seed, we’d demoed the product to the champion there, then heard nothing for a month. I was on the tube heading to an FCA event when he texted saying the team wanted us to come into their offices the next morning. It epitomized how we operate as a company – always doing huge things, and earlier than expected. In that moment I knew we would do whatever it took to sign them as a client, and then we did (to be announced soon).