Looking back at 2025, I can say with confidence: we grew, we matured, and we made big bets.

For us, the end of this year marks the completion of “Phase I” of the WeDiscover story – a chapter spanning our first five years.

We started with just two people and a hypothesis: that the future of performance marketing belonged to those who could engineer growth, not just manage media. Today, that hypothesis is a reality. We have grown from two founders to a team of 60 incredible people managing over £300m in annual media spend. We are partnering with some of Britain’s largest brands and delivering complex work across North America, Europe, and APAC.

It’s been a milestone journey, but as always, it wasn’t a straight line. Here is how 2025 looked for us.

If I look at the broader market in 2025, there were plenty of reasons to hit the pause button.

We had the uncertainty around tariffs coming out of the US in the Spring, followed by the waiting game surrounding the UK Budget in the Autumn. For many businesses, 2025 became a year of waiting to see what would happen next.

I didn’t want us to take that approach. We made a conscious decision to ignore the noise.

We’ve learned that if you wait for the “perfect” economic conditions to execute your strategy, you’ll be waiting forever. Governments change, policies shift, and economies fluctuate. Those are variables we cannot control.

Instead, we focused entirely on what we can control: the quality of our work for clients, the development of our team, and the momentum of our product roadmap.

By refusing to let the macro-economic climate dictate our pace, we kept moving forward. That refusal to pause is exactly why we achieved the results we did.

That discipline paid off. By keeping our heads down and sticking to our “bigger bets” strategy, we hit our targets.
We achieved 50% top-line revenue growth and hit our headcount target of 60 team members exactly.

Crucially, we maintained our pitch win rate between 80-90%. That’s a metric I watch closely because it validates that our proposition—high-performance media underpinned by data science and engineering—resonates even more strongly as we get bigger.
Looking at the longer term, over the last five years, our Compound Annual Growth Rate sits at roughly 85%. As we move into our next phase, naturally, that percentage growth will settle a bit as our base numbers get larger. For 2026, we’re aiming for around 40% growth—still ambitious, but sustainable.

In 2024, we decided to launch a dedicated Product Team. The goal was to build proprietary technology that could serve our internal teams but also stand alone as licensable products for brands.

We launched four products this year, but the standout has been Metis.

Metis is our product classification engine, driven by AI we developed in-house. We made a conscious decision to pour the majority of our resources into this one engine, and the results have been remarkable. We’ve deployed it five times so far, across brands spending anywhere from £50k to £3.5m per month. In every single instance, the ROI has been positive, ranging from an 11% to 48% uplift.

Focusing so heavily on Metis meant we had to park some other tech projects until 2026. That’s always a tough call, but we have high standards. We don’t build basic “agency tech”; we create technology robust enough to stand entirely on its own. If we can’t do it to that standard, we don’t ship it.

To support this growth, we also overhauled our structure, introducing new Director and Head Of roles.

This wasn’t a quick fix; it involved months of planning to get right. It was a critical move for two reasons. Firstly, for our team, it opens up genuine career, development, and pastoral pathways. Secondly, for our clients, it ensures that as we scale, they retain access to deep expertise, keeping our most senior strategists focused on solving problems rather than managing admin.

I have to give a huge shout-out to the entire team for making this work. I recognise that structural change can be daunting—it’s natural to worry about what it means for your own role—but everyone has adapted incredibly well. Watching the team thrive within this new setup has been one of the highlights of my year.

It would be impossible to review 2025 without discussing the biggest theme in our industry: AI.

There is a lot of noise and speculation right now, but our view is simple. We see AI as a fundamental utility. It is the infrastructure that can power work, much like the internet itself. We don’t obsess over the technology; we care about the solutions it enables. We care about the result, not the hype.

For us, AI serves two distinct purposes.

The first is operational. It handles the gaps between tasks, speeding up processes so our team can focus on where they add unique human value: strategy, communication, and innovation. This is “table stakes” for any modern agency. It’s useful, but it’s not the main event.

The second purpose—and where we spend 70% of our focus—is using AI to build products that simply weren’t possible before.

Rather than just optimising existing workflows, we are using AI to create entirely new paradigms of technology. For example, in 2025 we developed our own proprietary neural network. This wasn’t an off-the-shelf plugin; it was a custom build that became the backbone of Metis and several other products.

This is where WeDiscover is uniquely positioned. Because we have such deep technical foundations—with teams of engineers and data scientists working alongside media experts—we can engineer these paradigms ourselves rather than renting them.
But we never lose sight of the fact that technology is the amplifier, and human talent is the signal. The agencies that thrive in the next decade won’t just be those with the best AI; it will be those with the best people wielding it.

I’ve always tried to be transparent in these updates about the things that didn’t go perfectly. This year, two major lessons stood out.

The first was about capacity. In the first half of the year, we were incredibly focused on the work—the new structure, the product development, and onboarding these complex new clients. We were running at a relentless pace to ensure everything was best-in-class.

The downside was that we took our eye off our own capacity. By the time we hit the summer, the team was feeling the stretch. In hindsight, we were probably a few months too slow to hire. We’ve sorted this now—our headcount is healthy, and the teams are supported—but I want to acknowledge the grit the team showed during that period. They carried a heavy load to get us to where we are, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.

The second lesson was about the discipline of prioritisation.

On the product side, there was so much technology we wanted to build. However, the lesson we have learned over the last five years is that if you split your attention across multiple things that are each a “priority,” they don’t get done quickly enough or to the standard we demand.

We had to learn to pull the handbrake. We had to be incredibly ruthless with where we focused our development time, which meant making the hard choice to push some exciting projects into 2026 so we could execute perfectly on the ones in front of us. It taught us that being ruthless with our attention isn’t a constraint; it’s a requirement for excellence.

As we began the year, we planned to run two Early Careers intakes. In reality, we opted for one larger intake just after the summer.

This was purely a capacity decision. With the intensity of the structural changes, product development, and new client onboarding in the first half of the year, we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to run a training programme to the standard we expect. We chose to wait until the summer when we had the capacity to do it right, rather than rushing it.

The intake itself has been fantastic. There is a real skills gap in the industry right now. While many agencies are cutting entry-level roles to protect short-term margins, we are taking the opposite approach. We are investing in the critical thinkers who can fuse technological expertise with marketing strategy.

For us, this is a primary growth engine. Today, 26% of our entire team has come through our Early Careers programme. That isn’t about altruism; it’s a strategic initiative for the long-term health of our agency.

On a community level, we continued our financial support for local food banks and charities. However, looking ahead to 2026, I have a personal goal to do more. I want to launch a training programme specifically designed to give people from underrepresented backgrounds a foothold in the industry—providing short, intensive training and then helping them secure placements and apprenticeships.

We are now entering “Phase II” of WeDiscover.

In 2025, we expanded our services to include Organic, Creative, and CRO. We launched these specifically because we saw an incredible opportunity to innovate.

With our data science and engineering foundations now mature, we can apply our proprietary technology to these disciplines to build something truly unique for our clients. It allows us to test creative with scientific precision and engineer conversion rates that directly accelerate business growth.

We are moving into these areas from a position of strength, using our core technology to turn these services into pure performance drivers.

For 2026, the goals are to grow the team to 80–90 people, aim for that 40% revenue increase, and continue the rollout of proprietary technology to grow the brands and clients we work with.

We’re in the strongest position we’ve ever been in. The foundation is set. Now, we climb.