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There’s something compelling about a former VC building their first startup. They’ve been on the other side of the table, and now it’s time to prove they can deliver their own winning product.

That’s the case with today’s profile, so scroll down to read all about Adclear.

But first:

• Know a good quantum tech team beginning their startup journey? QDNL Participations has announced the €25m first close of a €60m global fund for early stage quantum startups. The firm (which I do some comms work for) is based in the Netherlands, but plans to invest worldwide.

• Kiran Mehta, a former VC Investment Manager at Mercia, is to work with the fhunded programme in Lancashire to help boost levels of investment readiness and VC funding in the county.

– Martin

PS: Some pressing and serious family issues that I must attend to this week means it’s likely there won’t be an edition of the newsletter on Thursday. All should be back to normal next week. We’ve got loads of startups to share with you. Paying subscribers: you can read a bit more about this break in service at the end of today’s newsletter

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Adclear’s AI helps deliver faster and more reactive financial ads, without breaking the law

Ask any experienced social media manager, and they’ll probably tell you about the time they came up with an amazing piece of content reacting to a current trend or cultural moment. But by the time they got authorisation from the legal team to publish it, the moment was gone and the content was useless.

In the highly regulated world of financial products and services, this is an every day reality for marketing teams. It’s not just social posts; every single ad, web page, or piece of direct communication needs to be cleared by compliance specialists to make sure they don’t fall foul of strict rules about how financial products can be promoted.

As Joe Jordan, co-founder and CCO of Adclear, explains, marketers can wait days or weeks for clearance to publish, depending on the size of the company and the workload of the compliance team.

And so Adclear has been built to let generative AI lighten the load for compliance specialists. The software is trained on both legal obligations imposed by the Financial Conduct Authority and any in-house rules or guidelines an individual company might use.

The software can then analyse text, images, audio, and video from marketing materials to give marketers instant feedback on what they need to change to be compliant.

For example, in the demo Jordan gave me, the software flagged up an image of someone relaxing in front of a trading screen. The problem? It was potentially in violations of rules to not make trading appear to be low risk.

While a human compliance officer will usually need to be involved to give final sign-off, Adclear is designed to dramatically cut down the time from request to approval. It also creates an audit trail to clearly record how any ad was approved, and by whom.

“It automates all the back and forth, and then when it gets sent to compliance they can just approve it after a spot check. And in some instances, marketing can self-approve, which obviously speeds up the process massively,” Jordan says.

The story so far

Jordan is a former associate with early-stage VC firm Supernode Global.

“I was a seed stage investor. Media, AI, and 3D and were my niches. I led on four investments, and I supported the build-out of our portfolio. So I was able to see the market a little bit, understand technology, have a good network to tap into.”

Adclear isn’t Jordan’s first foray into entrepreneurship - he says he founded a grant-funded business at university, but this time he’s teamed up with two friends to tackle something more ambitious.

After hearing from a family member who works in the regulation and approval of radio ads about how manual a process it was, Jordan says the seed of an idea was planted.

Doni Hoti, a childhood friend of Jordan’s understood the problem Adclear is tackling from his time expanding products into new markets at stock exchange Euronext. Another friend, Cameron Ward, joined to lead on building the software.

Jordan says the team initially put together a proof-of-concept based around radio advertising rules.

“This was at the start of the generative AI boom, and we were able to prove that it did work, and it was able to save them time and automate a lot of the process,” Jordan says.

Looking to tackle a bigger market than radio, they started to explore other options and discovered demand from financially regulated firms.

Jordan says they signed up fintech company Plum as their first customer and design partner to build something for the financial sector.

“We had a design partnership for four weeks. We built a mock-up to show them, ‘this is what we think we can do for you’. And then we were tasked with actually building what we promised. Since that moment, Plum have uploaded 1,000+ promotions to Adclear, and we've also signed a few other clients.”

Jordan says other new customers since launch in the autumn include Creditspring, Trade Nation, and AudioStack. That last one there is interesting as it’s a product that can create AI-generated audio ads, which obviously will need to be as compliant with regulations as any others.

Meanwhile, Jordan seems particularly enthusiastic for the product’s potential for reactive marketing.

“A lot of this stuff is tagged as ‘urgent: must approve now’, and compliance are drowning in a bottleneck when they've got a million what other things to do. So our ICP [ideal customer profile] really is these high-risk products that are regulated, but have reactive marketing; they want the same-hour approvals.”

Funding

Adclear was initially bootstrapped as an evening-and-weekends project, until Hoti took the plunge first to go full-time.

“Our biggest resource was our time, which we spent towards it,” Jordan says. “We were waiting before we built anything. I’d seen it before as a VC, don’t build anything until you know there’s demand.”

After signing up Plum as their first customer and establishing some nascent demand, Adclear raised a £510,000 pre-seed round, which they have just announced.

Investors in the round are VC firms Haatch, Force Over Mass, and Founders Capital.

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