South East Angels backs Sussex-based Flourish to fix how global brands navigate marketing operations and compliance
South East Angels is pleased to announce its investment in Flourish, a Sussex-based AI platform that helps large brands manage the operational workflow and regulatory compliance of their marketing campaigns.
The investment will support the company's growth as it scales its platform across regulated industries including FMCG, pharma, medtech, and financial services - sectors where marketing teams routinely face significant delays, legal exposure, and campaign failures as a result of inadequate operations and claim substantiation processes.
Founded by Maddy Cooper, Flourish addresses a specific and well-documented problem: the friction between marketing teams that need to move fast and legal teams that need to verify that advertising claims are substantiated and compliant with applicable regulations.
The platform gives brands a centralised repository for storing verified evidence behind their claims, a live database tracking 4,500+ regulations across 120+ jurisdictions, and a suite of AI agents that assist with research, copywriting and compliance review. The result is that claims can be approved in days rather than weeks, with a full audit trail, reducing both regulatory risk and the wasted cost of campaigns that get pulled at the sign-off stage.
"We're building Flourish into the standard operating infrastructure for how global brands create and approve their marketing," said Maddy Cooper, Founder and CEO. "The problem is universal - any brand making product claims in regulated markets faces the same tension between creative ambition and legal caution. We've built the system that resolves it, and the demand we're seeing from some of the world's biggest companies confirms we're solving a real and costly problem."
Flourish has demonstrated meaningful early traction, with major enterprises signed as early customers. Published metrics from live deployments show 94% faster legal sign-off per asset and 58% faster overall speed to market.
"Flourish is solving a problem that exists in almost every large regulated business, but one that nobody has systematically addressed with software. The combination of Maddy's domain expertise, and early validation from enterprise clients made this a compelling angel investment opportunity." — Jake Fox, Syndicate Lead, South East Angels.
