New York: ZeroDrift has emerged from stealth with a $2 million pre-seed funding round led by a16z speedrun, positioning itself to automate enterprise communication compliance in real time as organizations increasingly adopt AI-driven workflows and multi-channel communication.
The funding will support ZeroDrift’s go-to-market launch, product expansion across communication channels, and continued development of its AI-driven compliance engine. With this round, the company’s total funding stands at $2 million.
ZeroDrift Aims to Transform Enterprise Compliance Infrastructure
In regulated industries, speed has become a competitive advantage, but compliance remains a structural constraint.
Teams often want to launch campaigns, communicate with clients, and deploy AI tools quickly, yet every message must pass manual review processes. This results in delays, reduced momentum, and in some cases, teams avoiding written communication altogether.
ZeroDrift was built to address this challenge by automating compliance in real time, enabling organizations to move faster while providing compliance teams with scalable oversight infrastructure.
Traditional compliance models rely on manual redlines, approval queues, and post-hoc sampling — processes designed for an earlier communication era.
As communication volume increases across digital channels, these approaches struggle to scale. ZeroDrift shifts compliance from a final approval checkpoint to an automated guardrail embedded within communication workflows.
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AI-Native Communication Firewall
ZeroDrift operates as an AI-native communication firewall that validates and fixes content before it is sent. The platform encodes SEC, FINRA, and firm-specific policies into machine-readable rulepacks and enforces them at the point of content creation.
The system integrates directly into commonly used enterprise tools, including email platforms, browsers, CRMs, websites, social platforms, and AI systems.
Messages are checked instantly, issues are flagged with suggested fixes, and compliant content moves forward without delay. Compliance teams maintain oversight through centralized dashboards, audit trails, and automatically generated exam-ready evidence.
“People do not want to be non-compliant. They just have no way to know if what they are writing is acceptable until it is too late,” said Kumesh Aroomoogan, founder and CEO of ZeroDrift.
“Compliance should be a guardrail that lets teams move faster, not a gate that slows everything down. Our goal is to make compliance happen automatically at the speed of work.”
Founder Insight Behind ZeroDrift
The idea for ZeroDrift emerged from Kumesh Aroomoogan’s experience building Accern, one of the early no-code AI platforms for financial services, which he exited through acquisition in 2025.
During that journey, he observed legal and compliance reviews frequently slowing product launches and reducing operational momentum.
He also noticed behavioral changes within organizations, with employees preferring phone calls over written communication due to uncertainty about compliance requirements. ZeroDrift was created to provide real-time certainty and remove this friction from enterprise communication.
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Initial Focus on Financial Services
ZeroDrift is launching initially in financial services, targeting registered investment advisors, asset managers, broker-dealers, and wealth platforms.
The potential market includes more than 15,000 RIAs, 3,500 asset managers, and hundreds of thousands of registered representatives in the United States.
Early use cases include faster campaign launches, improved sales velocity, safe deployment of client-facing AI tools, and instant exam readiness without last-minute preparation.
As firms expand communication across email, websites, social platforms, client portals, and AI assistants, compliance complexity continues to grow.
Manual review processes and expanding compliance teams are increasingly difficult to sustain, creating demand for automated governance infrastructure.
“Compliance has quietly become a limiting factor for how fast regulated companies can operate,” said Troy Kirwin from a16z speedrun.
“ZeroDrift flips that dynamic by preventing violations before they happen and making compliance a built-in part of everyday workflows.”
Expansion Plans for ZeroDrift
Looking ahead, ZeroDrift plans to deepen its presence in financial services while expanding its rule-based compliance engine into additional regulated sectors, including insurance, healthcare, ESG disclosures, and AI governance.
The company’s long-term vision is to become a universal trust layer for communication systems, ensuring that as AI adoption and automation scale, trust, safety, and compliance scale alongside them.
