Solas Compliance raised £670K so that marketing and legal don't have to fight

Neil Dillon spent years sitting between marketing and compliance teams at Flutter, watching a familiar fight play out: marketing wanted campaigns live the next day, and legal needed time to check them. "It was just a process that I thought was completely broken," he said on The BettingStartups Podcast. He left the industry for a decade—training as a lawyer in Dublin, an MBA at London Business School, a stint helping startups raise capital, then a banking-tech job where he first started using AI to make a small commercial team punch above its size. When he came back to gambling nine months ago, he built Solas Compliance to fix the exact problem he'd lived on the inside.

Solas is an AI-powered marketing compliance tool that reviews content before it goes live—flagging missing disclaimers, mismatched terms and conditions, and other regulatory issues that would otherwise bounce back and forth between marketing and legal. Dillon is explicit that it isn't meant to replace a human sign-off. "We don't automate it. It's still important to have a human in the loop," he said, since regulators won't accept "the AI said it was okay" as a defense.

The clearest proof point came during the FIFA World Cup, when a customer got FIFA's brand and IP guidelines on a Friday night with creative already built and needed the tool trained on those rules by Monday. Dillon's team worked the weekend, and what would have taken the operator one or two weeks—reviewing roughly 120 original assets that expanded into hundreds once resized—came back in minutes, or maybe to an hour depending on how large the assets were.

Dillon argues that enterprise compliance tooling lives or dies on three things: consistency, auditability, and cost. He points to Harvard Business School's "Jagged Frontier" research, noting that AI capability doesn't scale smoothly with model size—a frontier model can ace one task and fail one a junior employee would nail. For a job that requires the same judgment call on asset one and asset 120, Solas runs five specific models it trains and hosts itself, rather than routing every check through a general-purpose API. "I'm chasing the most boring, consistent one because that's the one that doesn't get you fined," he said.

Solas has raised £670,000 to date and is working with two unnamed tier-one operators across Brazil, Greece, the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and the U.K. Dillon expects to close several financial services clients in the coming weeks and is planning a $2M–$4M raise for the fourth quarter. The near-term goal is to be live in every major regulated betting market by December; the longer one is to become the standard marketing-compliance layer not just for gambling, but for financial services, pharma, and food and beverage.

Listen to the full conversation with Dillon on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.