Why we invested in Adclear

We’re thrilled to announce our lead investment in the £2.1m seed round of Adclear, an AI-powered compliance automation platform, alongside our friends AFG Partners, Tenity, Haatch, Force Over Mass, and a group of world-class angel investors.

At Outward VC, we are excited by founders building technology that enables regulated industries to move with the speed and confidence of the world’s most agile, innovative companies. Adclear is doing exactly that – transforming compliance from a bottleneck into an enabler of growth.

Marketing has undergone a structural shift over the past decade. Digital completely dominates global ad spend, social media has overtaken search for younger audiences, and short-form video has become the most powerful medium for engagement. The rise of generative AI has also turbocharged content creation, enabling marketing teams to produce more, faster, and across more channels than ever before.

In regulated industries such as financial services, a sector deeply within Outward’s DNA, this acceleration brings a new kind of challenge. Firms are expected to produce high volumes of creative content, both proactively and reactively, to continue engaging their audiences, but every piece must be reviewed for compliance – against regulatory, policy and brand rules and guidelines – before it can be published.

This process is painfully manual. Most marketing teams upload assets into general purpose collaboration tools such as SharePoint or Jira (or for many, email!), where compliance reviewers manually review each piece of marketing collateral. They leave comments, request changes and log approvals line-by-line for audit. Each piece must comply with a growing patchwork of rules that vary by jurisdiction and product type – from FinProm regulations to Consumer Duty – and must be archived for years.

The result is a costly, slow and inconsistent process that is universally loathed by all involved. Reviews that should take hours often take days. Capacity doesn’t scale without hiring more compliance staff, and risk tolerance varies between reviewers, leading to inconsistency and constant rework. In practice, this means marketing teams avoid certain marketing formats and channels altogether, because their organisations lack the capacity to review them fast enough.

In an age where AI can generate high quality content with single prompts in seconds, and audiences are fleeting, the current system simply doesn’t work. In regulated industries, compliance has become a structural brake on growth. We believe that constraint is not sustainable and, increasingly, unnecessary.

Adclear has built an AI-powered compliance automation platform that automates the end-to-end marketing review and approval process, with an initial focus on regulated financial promotions.

Marketing teams upload content – across text, image, video or audio – and Adclear’s multi-agent system automatically analyses it against relevant regulations, internal policies and brand guidelines. Trained on regulatory handbooks, internal policies and tailored to each client’s preferences and levels of risk tolerance, the platform generates comments and recommendations indistinguishable from those of an experienced compliance professional.

What once took multiple reviewers and countless email threads can now happen in minutes.

Beyond automation, Adclear replaces the patchwork of systems used today with one collaborative workspace for marketing, compliance and product teams. It centralises reviews, versions and approvals in an audit-ready environment, turning compliance from a fragmented pain point into a streamlined workflow.

For users, the benefits have been clear: faster approvals, greater consistency, and higher marketing throughput. In short, compliance that truly scales.

We had the great fortune of getting to know founders and long-time friends Doni, Joe and Cam for well over a year, following their journey from going full-time, raising their pre-seed and executing flawlessly to this point. From a personal perspective, they embody everything we at Outward love to see in a founding team, which simply put, is exceptional talent combined with an underdog mentality. More practically, they are first-time founders that we’ve seen approach every aspect of their business-like seasoned entrepreneurs. Thinking deeply about culture, obsessing over the customer and remaining relentlessly focused on building a best-in-class product.

Fully convinced by the team who at the time were heads down building, we took the opportunity to reach out to our fintech and financial services network to get a sense of the depth of this problem. I have rarely come across such an unequivocal validation of a problem from all corners of the market, but what I didn’t expect was quite how many of our network (all non-clients) already knew of Adclear and provided rave reviews. A number had even confirmed their intention to sign as clients. Whilst I won’t mention names, I had one single piece of very sceptical feedback. A month later, I received an email out-of-the-blue email from this same individual confirming they had just become a client. I’d love to say that this was the moment that I realised we had to partner with this team, but in truth our minds were long made up!

Their talent and relentless effort have seen Adclear grow from a single fintech design partner to a full roster of leading scale-up and enterprise clients across multiple continents and regulatory regimes in less than a year. Customers range from digital leaders like Monzo and PensionBee to tier-one financial institutions such as Lloyds – proof that the product resonates across the spectrum of financial services. Customers also highlighted clear and demonstrable ROI, reducing review times by almost 90% and increasing marketing output for clients such as Plum by 18x.

Most importantly, however, customers absolutely love using the product and this came across in every customer interaction, without exception. The company’s initial focus on a narrow, but high-pain wedge – financial promotions compliance – has proven to be highly fruitful. It’s given Adclear a clear entry point, strong credibility, and a clear pathway to expand vertically and horizontally into other compliance and operations use cases. From here, the potential to scale across jurisdictions and sectors is vast.

We invested in Adclear because we see a generational opportunity to redefine how compliance operates in a digital-first and AI-native world. The combination of regulatory pressure, exploding content volume and maturing AI capability make automation inevitable, and Adclear’s team is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation.

We’re proud to back Doni, Joe and Cameron as they build the category-defining company turning compliance into an enabler of growth.