My big idea: Ad Signal

Hi Tom! What's your elevator pitch?

Ad Signal builds tools that help media companies make sense of their content. We use fingerprinting tech to identify what’s actually unique in your video, audio and image files, so you’re not storing duplicates or running the same thing through AI hundreds of times. That means less cost, less storage and a lot less carbon. We’ve built the backend stuff that fixes problems most people don’t even realise are fixable.

Why does the market need it?

Because current systems are a mess. Most companies don’t know what they’ve got, where it is or whether they even need it. You’ve got huge archives full of files with slight changes - different aspect ratio, different length – and they’re all treated like new content. Existing solutions can’t see through that. The result is people wasting money storing and streaming duplicate assets, and running unnecessary processing on files that are basically identical. We tackle that by identifying what’s genuinely unique, up front, before it clogs everything up.

And it’s not just about saving time and money – we are tackling a huge sustainability issue for the industry. Video content is growing at over 27% a year. That growth is pumping more and more data into storage systems and CDNs that are hugely carbon-intensive. If you can strip out what doesn’t need to be there before it ever hits the archive or goes near AI, you massively cut emissions. We’re talking about the potential to reduce global CO₂ by up to 1% if it’s adopted widely, and that’s not a small number.

Where is the business today?

We’ve just secured £3 million in investment, expanded our team and are now working with organisations such as Sky, Clearcast and BARB. We’ve got multiple products live - Match, Foresight and Assure - and real traction with clients. The tech’s proven, and the patents are coming through. We’ve gone from a bootstrapped team doing everything ourselves to a company that's scaling quickly and being taken seriously across the media and entertainment space.

What made you think there was money in this?

Honestly, I didn’t go into it thinking “this’ll make loads of money.” I kept seeing the same problems in media and entertainment and people saying “this can’t be solved” or “there’s no solution”. So, I built tools to try. I’d been working behind the scenes as a developer and kept running into the same issues. When I built something that actually worked, people took notice. From there, it just made sense to keep going. The money followed the solution.

How did you research the niche? What's wrong with your competitors?

I didn’t do market research in the traditional sense. I was in the middle of it, working across all sorts of projects in media and seeing first-hand what wasn’t working. Watermarking didn’t have the accuracy or wasn’t usable for some needs. Existing solutions couldn’t differentiate between versions. People were using workarounds or just accepting the pain. That told me enough. And we’ve had people tell us straight up that what we’re doing sounds too good to be true - until they see it work.

What’s your biggest strength?

The fingerprinting tech is a huge one. It works on both image and audio, which most don’t. That means we can spot tiny differences and do things like track content, deduplicate assets, reduce AI waste and even automate IMF creation. Additionally, we’ve patents pending on core components. But honestly, it’s also the team. A lot of people who’ve worked with me before have joined Ad Signal. They didn’t need convincing, and that says a lot.

What’s the secret to making the business work?

The hard part has always been prioritisation. Especially when we were self-funded, every decision on what to build next came out of revenue from other work. I’ve chased shiny opportunities that didn’t pan out, and learned from it. You’ve got to keep focus and have tenacity, even when something exciting comes along. The other big thing is people. Hiring well, knowing when to support someone and when it’s not the right fit. That stuff’s hard, but it makes or breaks the business.

How do you market the company?

Primarily through the big industry trade shows that happen every year (IBC, NAB). After that it’s through connections or our growing network of channel partners.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We raised £3 million from a Venture Capital Trust in March 2025. That’s allowed us to speed things up - more hires, faster product rollouts and a broader reach. It’s enough for now, yes. It’s giving us the runway to get the next stage of growth done properly without concerns over cashflow every month. Before that, we were completely self-funded and revenue-funded, which meant that payday stress was very real.

Tell us about the business model

‍Most of our products are charged per minute of video processed. For Match Asset Health, this means a one-off cost that results in storage savings that last forever, and most clients will break even on their investment in as little as six months. Match AI optimisation will offer savings for every asset sent to AI. Many of our other products follow the same pricing model.

We have both technical and channel partners around the globe able to offer our services. A number of these are solutions that our clients are currently using to hold their content, making accessing our services and their benefits a simple button click.

Our products apply to production companies, streamers, broadcasters and more. We can deal with existing digital content, but we can also aid in digitisation and migration projects. We are also able to deduplicate content before it hits the new storage location, saving both the expected storage costs and the costly migration fees.

All of our products and features are available via our API and UI. However, we expect the majority of our customers to use the API to move content and data to and from their primary DAM / MAM / systems integrator seamlessly.

What were you doing before?

‍Contracting. I worked across just about every industry, always building stuff, mostly as a developer and software architect. Before that, I was in a design agency as a salesman. I got into coding when I was six, ended up doing sciences, tried law, knew it wasn’t for me, left with an HND and went from there. I only have two speeds, full speed and off and for every job I’ve had I’ve always given it everything I had; this was often recognised and I rose up the ranks. My sweet spot is the area where business and tech overlap. There are plenty of better devs out there, but I can design elegant solutions to complex business needs, but also new business opportunities from that tech.

Are there any technologies you’ve found useful?

We use Slack as our primary source of communication paired with Google Suite to manage content and Google Meet. Float allows us to track our time spent on different R&D projects.

What is the future vision?

We want to keep doing what we’re doing, but at scale. More products, more automation, more problems solved before they grow. We’re planning to grow the team to over 100 people and to launch five new products by the end of 2026. But the bigger picture is around impact. If this tech gets adopted widely, we’re talking about saving 1% of the world’s CO₂ emissions. That’s the equivalent of grounding 40% of all commercial flights. It's an exciting time where we’re trying to fix things that genuinely need fixing.