We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Austin Carroll a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Austin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

One of the biggest ways we differ from the industry standard is simple: Warrant was built by the people compliance usually frustrates—marketers. Most compliance tools are built for legal teams, not for the creative people trying to launch campaigns under pressure. They’re clunky, slow, and totally disconnected from how marketing actually works.

At Warrant, we flipped the script. We built a platform that works the way marketers do—fast, collaborative, and brand-first. Then we layered in smart compliance automation, audit trails, and multi-level approvals that legal and compliance teams love.

What really sets us apart? Warrant learns from your past reviewed marketing content—so every compliance suggestion is tailored to your brand voice, risk tolerance, and historical approvals. Instead of generic legal advice, you get context-aware guidance that makes sense for your business instantly.

Here’s why that matters: when our founder led marketing at Brex and Mercury, she saw brilliant ideas stall—or die—in Google Docs while waiting for compliance feedback. It killed momentum and made it nearly impossible to retain top talent. With Warrant, companies can move faster, keep their brand voice intact, and finally give marketers and compliance teams the shared language they’ve been missing.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hi! I’m Austin Carroll, the founder of Warrant—an AI-powered platform that helps marketing and compliance teams work better together in highly regulated industries like fintech, insurance, and real estate.

Before Warrant, I led Financial Product Marketing at Brex and Mercury, where I launched new financial products and managed marketing compliance across dozens of campaigns. I saw firsthand how confusing regulations and slow approval processes stalled growth, delayed launches, and made it nearly impossible to hire and retain great marketers. In fact, the average tenure for marketers in fintech is just 1.5 years—something I experienced again and again.

So I decided to do something about it.

Warrant is a first-of-its-kind platform that brings compliance into the creation process—where marketers actually work. Our AI reviews content instantly against thousands of regulations, suggests edits based on what your team has approved in the past, and keeps everything audit-ready with automated version tracking and multi-level approvals.

What sets us apart is our approach: Warrant is built for marketers first, with compliance built in—not bolted on. We’re proud to help teams launch faster, stay compliant, and finally get back to doing the creative work they love—without getting bogged down in red tape.

What I’m most proud of is that we’ve been our own first customer. We’ve lived this pain. And now, we get to solve it for others.

Have you ever had to pivot?

We originally launched Warrant as a kanban-style dashboard to help teams track compliance reviews. It worked—teams liked the organization and visibility—but we quickly realized something important: we hadn’t changed the process, we’d just built a better spreadsheet. The core problem remained—slow, manual reviews were still draining teams and delaying growth.

So after six months, we made the tough call to sunset our first product. We went back to the drawing board and rebuilt Warrant from the ground up—not as a tracker, but as an AI agent that learns from past approvals and helps teams get feedback in real time. Today, Warrant checks content instantly, flags issues, suggests edits aligned with your brand voice, and keeps teams audit-ready—without the back-and-forth.

That pivot taught us something huge: real innovation doesn’t just reinvvent the mousetrap—it reimagines how it should work in the first place.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

As a female founder, raising capital wasn’t easy. Over the course of four months, we pitched to more than 100 VCs. A lot of doors closed—but we kept going.

Our first break came from Techstars, which believed in the vision early and gave us our first check. That seed funding gave us just enough runway to build the first version of Warrant and get our early customers on board.

We finally closed our $720,000 pre-seed in February of 2025, with participation from Brickyard, Capitalize, Vast Ventures, and more.

We’ve been scrappy ever since—focused on building real value, not just chasing capital. In fact, we just started paying ourselves this month. Every dollar before that went straight into the product, the team, and our customers.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hellowarrant.com
• Other: Newsletter: https://marketings-most-wanted.beehiiv.com/