WHY WE INVESTED: ADCLEAR
LEGACY TOOLS, MODERN DEMANDS: THE COMPLIANCE GAP IN FINANCIAL MARKETING
Over the past few years, the volume and complexity of financial marketing has exploded. Digital-first distribution, always-on performance marketing, and generative AI have enabled teams to spin up personalised campaigns across web, social, video, audio, and product surfaces at a fraction of the historical cost and time. This growth is set to continue as financial services lean further into content-led acquisition and education, creating a structurally larger and more fragmented universe of financial promotions.
Compliance teams in financial institutions are still manually reviewing financial promotions, monitoring affiliates, handling complaints, mapping customer journeys, and scanning for regulatory changes across multiple jurisdictions. These processes typically run through email, shared drives, and spreadsheets, leading to slow turnaround times, inconsistent application of rules, and limited visibility across channels and campaigns.
At the same time, marketing teams are shipping more content across web, social, audio, video, and product interfaces, including AI-generated assets that increase both volume and complexity. Legacy compliance tools are either generic, shallow portals or rigid rules engines that do not reflect the speed, experimentation, and multi-jurisdictional nature of modern financial marketing, leaving a clear gap between what teams need and what existing systems can support.
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AI COMPLIANCE BUILT FOR THE PACE OF MODERN FINANCE
Adclear addresses this gap with an AI RegTech platform purpose-built for marketing and financial promotions compliance in regulated financial services. The product delivers instant, AI-powered review of promotions across formats such as text, web pages, PDFs, audio, and video, with embedded workflows, audit trails, version history, and collaboration tools that replace ad hoc email chains.​
The company already serves a mix of digitally native fintechs and more traditional financial institutions, including neobanks, wealth and investing platforms, trading firms, and other regulated financial services providers. Its customer base spans the UK and international markets, with clients such as Lloyds Bank, Plum, Freetrade, and Yonder, demonstrating that the platform has been developed as a global solution from day one and can support multiple jurisdictions and regulatory regimes. ​​
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The value proposition is threefold: immediate ROI by significantly reducing review time, scalability by reducing manual workload and enabling audit-ready record-keeping, and long-term defensibility through the data and policy logic captured inside the system. Key use cases include third-party management (monitoring finfluencers, affiliates, and agencies), automated monitoring of complaints and calls, and horizon scanning to map regulatory changes across the UK, EU, US, and other markets.​
Adclear’s architecture is built around modular AI agents that can be configured to different regulatory regimes, product sets, and firm-specific risk appetites, allowing it to adapt quickly as rules evolve or new content types emerge. This stands in contrast to legacy platforms that are slow to update, overly broad, and insufficiently tailored to the nuances of financial promotions, especially for high-growth fintechs and digitally led institutions.
Each review contributes to a growing knowledge graph that links promotions, rules, phrases, products, comments, and regulatory changes at the level of each organisation. The longer-term vision is to build a comprehensive knowledge graph for every customer, capturing these relationships in a way that creates richer context for both evaluation and learning, further improving accuracy over time and deepening Adclear’s role as core compliance infrastructure.
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GROWTH VISION, EXPANSION, AND USE OF PROCEEDS
Looking ahead, Adclear has multiple avenues for expansion. Vertically, the platform can extend into adjacent Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) use cases such as fraud detection, monitoring, and broader compliance mapping across different regimes. Horizontally, many of the requirements seen in financial services are mirrored in other regulated sectors, such as healthcare/pharma, gambling, and food and beverage, offering a path to cross-industry expansion.
The proceeds from this round will be used to deepen Adclear’s product moat and support targeted geographic expansion. On the product side, the company plans to scale its lean R&D team, further develop its modular AI agent architecture, and accelerate the build-out of its multi-regime compliance engine and organisation-level knowledge graph. Geographically, Adclear will focus on expanding beyond its UK base into other key financial centres, with a particular emphasis on the US, where similar marketing compliance pressures are emerging, and Asia, where AFG’s financial services network can help unlock value.
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THE TEAM BEHIND ADCLEAR
Doni (CEO) and Joe (CCO) bring over a decade of shared trust and complementary experience across financial services–adjacent sectors, consulting, and venture capital, which translates into strong leadership alignment and adaptability. Together with Cameron (CTO), a proven engineer with experience at high-performing London startups such as Arqit and Trayport, they have built a robust platform from the ground up with limited resources.
Within months of the platform going live, the team has secured 13 paying customers with mid–five-digit average contract values, including multi-year agreements with well-known fintechs and larger financial services firms. They have done this by selling into the right mix of internal stakeholders, balancing shorter fintech sales cycles with longer enterprise procurement to drive consistent month‑on‑month ARR growth from launch and prove both product–market fit and a repeatable go‑to‑market strategy in a short period of time.
If you'd like to learn more about AFG’s investment in Adclear, please feel free to reach out to Ivan Ong (Partner at AFG Partners).​