My Big Idea: Investigative intelligence platform Yoono

‍Hi Richard! What's your elevator pitch?

Yoono is an investigative intelligence platform for organisations making high consequence decisions about people.

Using artificial intelligence, we search and analyse information from a wide range of public sources to produce detailed, structured and audit ready intelligence reports. Our clients use Yoono for enhanced due diligence, financial crime investigations, senior appointments, investment decisions, employee vetting and other situations where conventional screening does not provide enough depth.

In simple terms, we help organisations understand who they are really dealing with, more quickly and with greater confidence.

Why does the market need it?

There is a significant gap between automated screening and a full manual investigation.

Traditional screening platforms are very effective at checking names against databases containing sanctions, politically exposed persons, watchlists and adverse media. However, when a case is complex, higher risk or ambiguous, the process often becomes fragmented and heavily reliant on manual research.

Analysts may spend hours or even days searching across corporate records, court documents, regulatory actions, news sources, social media and other public information. They then have to determine whether the information relates to the correct individual, understand the wider context and produce a report that another person can review and defend.

At the other end of the market, specialist intelligence firms can undertake this work manually, but it can be slow and expensive.

Yoono sits between those two approaches. We automate much of the investigative process while retaining the depth, structure and evidential trail required for important decisions. We are not trying to replace professional judgement. Instead we give professionals a much stronger intelligence foundation from which to exercise it.

Where is the business today? 

Yoono is commercially live and being used by organisations across regulated financial services, professional services and other high trust environments.

We have secured significant investment to develop the technology, build an experienced team and support the next stage of our commercial growth. We have moved beyond proving whether the technology works. The focus now is demonstrating its value across real customer workflows, converting that value into recurring revenues and scaling the commercial organisation around it.

The results have been extremely encouraging. Customers have told us that reports which might previously have taken hours or days can be produced much more quickly. In one case, Yoono saved around five days of research. In another, a client estimated that using the platform saved approximately £30,000 compared with commissioning equivalent work from a traditional intelligence bureau.

We are continuing to invest significantly in the product, including tools that allow users to interrogate reports using AI and visualise the relationships and networks surrounding an individual.

We are building initially from Jersey and focusing on regulated and high-consequence markets in the UK, Crown Dependencies and Luxembourg, with a clear opportunity to expand internationally in 2027.

What made you think there was money in this?

The commercial logic begins with the cost of the existing problem.

Highly trained investigators and compliance professionals spend a substantial amount of time gathering, checking and organising information before they can apply their expertise. That is expensive, difficult to scale and not always consistent. The alternative is often to commission an external investigation, which can cost thousands or tens of thousands of pounds.

If technology can reduce the time and cost involved while improving the consistency and auditability of the output, the return on investment is straightforward to demonstrate.

We researched the opportunity by speaking directly to potential users and working through real cases. The question was never simply whether people liked the technology. It was whether Yoono could find relevant information, save meaningful amounts of time and produce an output that customers could incorporate into real decision making processes.

Our competitors have helped validate the market, but many solutions remain concentrated at one of two extremes: relatively shallow automated screening or costly manual investigation. We believe there is a very large market for scalable investigative depth between the two.

What's your biggest strength?

Our biggest strength is the depth and quality of intelligence we can deliver at scale.

Identity is rarely as straightforward as matching a name. People use aliases, operate across jurisdictions and languages, hold interests through complicated company structures and appear in information that is fragmented across many different sources. Yoono is designed to resolve those identities, connect the relevant information and present it in a coherent way.

The product is important, but technology alone will not determine whether we succeed. We are building a team with deep expertise across technology, financial crime, investigations, regulated markets and complex enterprise sales.

My own experience also helps. This is my second time building and scaling a technology business, so I have a much clearer understanding of the importance of focus, recurring revenue, organisational culture and hiring exceptional people at the right stage.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Focus. The potential applications for investigative intelligence are enormous, and that creates a temptation to pursue too many markets at once. The real challenge is identifying where the problem is most acute, where the return on investment is easiest to demonstrate and where customers have both the authority and budget to act.

For us, that means initially concentrating on regulated organisations and other environments where decisions about people carry serious financial, regulatory or reputational consequences.

The second part is remaining very close to customers. Technology companies can become too attached to their own ideas. We involve customers in the development process, observe how the platform fits into their workflows and use real feedback to determine what we build next.

Finally, you need exceptional people. My job is to set a clear direction, build a culture with high standards and then empower capable people of taking genuine ownership. A founder cannot scale a business by remaining at the centre of every decision.

How do you market the company?

Yoono is not a product that should be marketed through broad claims about artificial intelligence. Buyers in regulated markets are experienced, appropriately sceptical and interested in evidence. They want to see what the platform finds, how it reached its conclusions and how the output could improve their existing process.

Demonstrations and carefully managed evaluations are therefore central to our approach. Where appropriate, we allow prospective customers to test Yoono using real cases and compare the results with their existing methods.

Relationships are also extremely important. We build credibility through industry networks, strategic partnerships, customer advocacy, events and informed content about the problems we solve.

My advice to other entrepreneurs would be to understand how your customers actually buy, rather than simply how you would like to sell. Particularly in enterprise markets, the user, budget holder, compliance team and final decision maker may all be different people.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We have sufficient funding to execute the current phase of our plan, continue developing the product and build the team required to establish the business in our initial markets.

Having capital available is important, particularly when building sophisticated technology and selling into large regulated organisations. However, funding should not become a substitute for commercial discipline. I want the business to remain focused on proving customer value, generating recurring revenue and building an economically sustainable model.

As we demonstrate further commercial traction and prepare for the next phase of international growth, we will consider whether additional investment could accelerate that opportunity.

Tell us about the business model

Yoono is a software subscription business with recurring revenues.

Customers typically commit to a monthly volume of reports, with pricing determined by usage and scale. Depending on volume and requirements, reports generally cost between approximately £150 and £350 each. Larger enterprise customers may require substantially higher volumes, tailored workflows or deeper integration into their existing systems.

This creates a clear return for the customer. If a report saves many hours of work by a skilled analyst, or avoids the need to commission an external investigation, the economic value can significantly exceed its price.

Like many technology businesses, our principal overheads are people, data, cloud infrastructure and continued product development. The underlying economics become increasingly attractive as report volumes grow because the platform allows us to deliver investigative depth without increasing headcount in direct proportion to usage.

Recurring revenue is particularly important. It gives the business predictability, supports continued investment and aligns our success with sustained customer value rather than one off transactions.

What were you doing before?

Before Yoono, I built and led iVendi, a financial technology business serving the automotive sector.

That experience taught me a great deal about building enterprise software, selling into regulated markets and scaling a recurring revenue business. It also taught me that growth exposes every weakness in an organisation. If the culture, leadership, product or commercial model is not strong enough, scale magnifies the problem.

This time, I am applying those lessons earlier. I am more disciplined about focus, quicker to make difficult decisions and much more conscious that the quality of the people around you ultimately determines the quality of the company.

Are there any technologies you've found useful?

Artificial intelligence is fundamental not only to the product we are building, but also to how we are building the company.

Yoono applies the latest advances in AI to search, analyse and connect large volumes of fragmented information, turning it into structured, actionable intelligence. We also use AI extensively throughout our product development process. It helps our team prototype more quickly, write and test software, solve technical problems and improve quality without requiring the size of engineering team that would traditionally have been needed.

As a second time software founder, the difference is extraordinary. We can now achieve far more, far faster and with significantly fewer developers than would previously have been possible. That does not reduce the importance of people; it makes the quality of the people you hire even more important.

Our strategy is to recruit exceptional individuals and give them the best AI tools available. Combining talented people, clear direction and AI-enabled ways of working allows us to move at pace without compromising quality. I believe this will become one of the defining advantages of the next generation of technology companies.

Why build the business from Jersey?

Jersey is a very good place from which to build a company focused on regulated and high trust markets.

It has a sophisticated financial services industry, a strong professional community and unusually good access to senior decision makers. That makes it an effective environment in which to work closely with customers, test ideas and develop a product around genuine market needs.

It also offers an excellent quality of life, which matters when you are building something demanding over many years.

The ambition, however, is international. I believe businesses can be built from Jersey without being limited by it. Technology, talent and capital are increasingly distributed, and smaller jurisdictions can create globally significant companies if they combine ambition with the right infrastructure and support. 

What is the future vision?

Our ambition is to make Yoono the intelligence layer behind high consequence decisions about people.

Today, much of that work is fragmented, manual and reactive. Over time, we believe organisations will move towards a more continuous and connected understanding of risk, one that brings together identities, companies, relationships, events and changing circumstances.

The long term opportunity extends across financial services, investment, professional services, government, law enforcement, defence, critical infrastructure and other sectors where understanding an individual and their wider network really matters.

We want to build a substantial international technology company from Jersey, with the product, people and credibility to define this emerging category.