Haast and the surprisingly expensive art of saying yes

At the Australian telecommunications company Mate, the problem was abundance. Offers changed. Promotions multiplied. Text, images and videos made promises across a sprawling digital presence. A small marketing and compliance team had to keep those promises straight. According to Haast’s customer account, manual checks left outdated material and overlooked requirements behind. The bottleneck appeared where a business wanted to be careful: in the checking.

Haast indexed Mate’s digital footprint, giving the company a way to find material, audit it and catch changes across channels. Its case study reports an 80% reduction in review time. Consider the mundane victory inside that number: fewer people hunting for an old offer while the next one waits to launch. Efficiency can look rather unglamorous from close up.

01 / The queue nobody photographs

Haast sells enterprise compliance software to marketing, legal and compliance teams. Its customers include insurers, trustees, superannuation businesses and telecommunications companies. These are organizations for which a sentence is more than decoration. It can describe a financial product, promise a price or require a disclaimer. A pleasing headline has to survive an unpleasing amount of scrutiny.

The founders brought complementary backgrounds. Kunal Vankadara, now CEO, combined legal training with government policy work and consulting at BCG. Liam King, the CTO, brought mathematics, statistics, machine learning and experience at Deloitte. Investor defy.vc also names Jason Watling as a co-founder. The current business dates its founding to 2023. Its mission is to remove repetitive compliance work and return time to more skilled tasks.

The company began in Australia and now has its headquarters in New York. Its careers page describes a distributed team of former lawyers, consultants and engineers. That combination makes sense for the product: someone must understand what a policy means, someone must understand what the customer actually does, and someone must make the check work inside a document.

02 / Eighty rules, and none optional

Equity Trustees offers a more revealing example than any slogan about AI. The trustee encoded more than 80 custom compliance requirements into Haast. Documents could be checked for missing disclaimers, required information and unsuitable terminology. Rules reflected clients’ circumstances and risk tolerances. The same customer account describes live checks across thousands of online resources, including fund-manager and superannuation marketing.

Here is Haast’s central proposition: a business needs its own interpretation of risk translated into repeatable checks. The platform takes regulations, internal policies and previous decisions, then configures agents around particular compliance tasks. Tolerance can vary by agent. A company might allow flexibility in tone while being strict about claims. “Sounds fine” is a wonderfully economical opinion until someone asks what, precisely, it means.

This places Haast between legal interpretation and marketing execution. Alternatives include manual review, general-purpose AI assistants and approval systems in digital asset management software. Haast’s positioning rests on customized checks, workflow integration and coverage after publication. Its own comparisons also name Warrant, Blee and PunttAI. Those comparisons express the vendor’s argument; they do not settle which product a particular buyer should choose.

03 / The skeptic opens Word

At Zurich Australia and New Zealand, the change arrived during drafting. Haast’s published case study describes line-by-line manual checks and repeated exchanges with legal. Wessel van Keulen, Head of Regulatory Change, Frameworks & Insights, recalls being skeptical of another AI tool. The interface and immediate results helped persuade him. He reports that drafting product disclosure statements and target market determinations took half the time.

“Now we have the Haast Check for compliance.”

Wessel van Keulen / Zurich ANZ

The practical detail is where feedback appears. In June 2026, Haast announced a Google Docs integration: run a review from a sidebar, jump to highlighted text, edit, re-check and submit unresolved findings for human review. In April it announced Adobe Silver Technology Partner status and a Workfront integration. Versions, approvals and findings stay connected. The check meets the writer while changing a sentence is still cheap.

04 / An old ad has no retirement plan

Publication is a peculiar finish line. The campaign team moves on; the claims remain online. Future Super used Haast to index and scan its website and social channels, making its expanding digital portfolio easier to search and monitor. That customer account describes identifying risky phrases and reducing manual remediation. The useful unit of work is the whole footprint, including material its authors may have forgotten.

Haast also offers regulatory horizon scanning, connecting relevant changes to obligations and review rules. Together, these functions cover a content lifecycle: check before publication, watch afterward, revisit when requirements change. A business buying only an approval gate should ask what happens to last year’s campaign. The internet is a diligent archivist and a terrible compliance officer.

05 / Buy the tool. Write the rulebook.

The commercial proposition is enterprise software with sales-led implementation. Haast’s legal team helps translate policies and precedents into checks. The cost to a buyer therefore deserves two conversations: the contract, and the work of deciding which rules the system should enforce. A purchase does not resolve disagreements about risk. Automating an ambiguous instruction can simply distribute the ambiguity faster.

Investors have financed the expansion. A US$12 million Series A announced in April 2026 was led by Peak XV Partners, bringing company-reported total funding to US$17.05 million. Haast also reported 4.5x revenue growth over twelve months and zero customer churn. Those are company figures. The investment backs a clear demand: more content creates more work for the people accountable for its claims.

The lesson readers can copy is procedural. Record recurring requirements. Give creators a chance to catch mistakes before submission. Preserve accountable review for the remaining judgments. Keep checking published material. These steps require maintained policies, engaged reviewers and access to the channels that matter. A forgotten rulebook is poor fuel for automation. Haast’s opportunity lies in making the working one available at the moment somebody writes a promise.