Ventures
I’m the founder and director of a connected group of companies working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, accessibility, and trust infrastructure. They are designed to compose. Each does one thing well; together they form a single trust architecture for AI in regulated sectors.
This page is the map. If you want to know who holds what, who I am to each, and how they fit together, this is where you find out.
How the ventures connect
The group is structured around a simple idea: trust at scale needs more than one kind of organisation to operate it. Standards bodies are not the same as certifiers. Certifiers are not the same as technology vendors. Mission-led organisations are not the same as commercial trading entities. To do this work properly, you need each.
The structure reflects that.
The entities
IOA Foundation CIC
Type: Community Interest Company
Role: Mission-led parent organisation
The Community Interest Company that anchors the accessibility and certification work. Provides community-interest oversight to the certification scheme and operates under the statutory community-interest test of UK CIC law. The CIC is the structural answer to a difficult question: why should consumers trust a private certification mark? The answer is that the certifier is ultimately accountable to a community-interest body, not to a profit-extracting parent.
Institute of Accessibility
Type: Standards body (within the IOA Foundation CIC structure)
Role: Industry standards, members, collective mark holder
Holder of the IoA Members Mark, a UK collective trade mark granted in May 2025. The Institute operates as a membership-based standards body for accessibility practitioners and member organisations. The mark indicates that the holder is a participating member.
International expansion of the mark is underway via the Madrid Protocol.
AccessFirst Initiative Limited
Type: Limited company (commercial trading subsidiary of IOA Foundation CIC)
Role: Certifier, commercial trading entity
Holder of the AFI Certified mark, a UK certification mark covering ten classes of public-facing goods and services. The application is at the acceptable in principle stage with UKIPO and is on track to publish in 2026.
AccessFirst is the commercial trading entity that, once the mark is granted, will issue certifications to public-facing services that meet the AFI accessibility standard. The certification scheme is designed to operate at scale across retail, hospitality, healthcare, financial services, transport, education, and the public sector.
aiGUARD Systems Limited
Type: Limited company
Role: Technology and IP holding entity
Holder of two patent applications — Thames Sentinel (GB2603184.9) and the Governance Execution Certificate, GEC (GB2607087.0) — both accepted by UKIPO for accelerated examination in April 2026. Also holds the aiGUARD word mark (UK00004354828, in examination).
aiGUARD Systems builds and licenses the technology that operates the runtime governance layer for AI in regulated sectors. The platform sits as a non-bypassable control point between AI output generation and delivery, enforcing runtime permissions derived from confidence, consequence, and user state. The GEC is the cryptographic certificate the platform issues for every governed output, retrievable and verifiable by any authorised third party.
Alclusio AI Limited
Type: Limited company
Role: Deployment vehicle
Counterparty to the IBM Statement of Work that is currently delivering a fixed-price proof-of-concept of the Alclusio agentic AI platform, integrating IBM watsonX Orchestrate with the aiGUARD governance layer. Alclusio is the first reference deployment of the trust architecture in production.
Hey Al Limited
Type: Limited company
Role: Related operating entity
Provides additional commercial flexibility within the group.
How I operate the group
I am the founder and director of every entity. The structure is deliberate — patents in the technology entity, marks in their respective holders, the certifier separate from the certified, the mission-led parent above the commercial trading vehicle. Each entity has a defined purpose and stays within it.
Inter-entity arrangements are formalised in service agreements. External communications follow holder discipline: statements about the IoA Members Mark are made by the Institute of Accessibility; statements about AFI Certification are made by AccessFirst Initiative Limited; statements about aiGUARD technology are made by aiGUARD Systems Limited.
The architecture works because the parts compose. The composition is intentional.