The People Behind the Rebrand: Our Culture, Our Mission, Our Moment

This blog was originally posted on 26th June, 2026. Further developments may have occurred after publication. To keep up-to-date with the latest compliance news, sign up to our newsletter.

AUTHORED BY SANDRA COOMBES, SVP OF PEOPLE & CULTURE, ADHERENT

There’s a particular feeling in a company when something big is building. You notice it in the energy of All Hands sessions, in the conversations that spill over from meetings into Slack, in the way people lean in a little differently when the product team shares what’s coming. For those of us at Compliance & Risks – now Adherent – that feeling has been quietly building for months. Today, it became real.

As SVP of People & Culture, I’ve had a front-row seat to the work that has gone into this moment. And what I want to tell you, more than anything about our new name, our new product and our new brand, is this: this didn’t happen to our team. Our team made it happen.

For the vision behind this launch, read our CEO Rahul Sachdev’s piece: A New Chapter: Compliance & Risks is Now Adherent.

From 2002 to Now – And Why the Name Had to Change

Compliance & Risks was founded in 2002 with a clear mission – to ensure that global companies have the tools and information to build safe, sustainable products in a world full of change. Over more than two decades, we’ve built one of the world’s most comprehensive regulatory intelligence foundations: 120,000+ regulations, over a million obligations, 135,000+ substances, spanning 195 countries and 20+ product categories. That’s not just data. That’s thousands of hours of expert human work, embedded into a platform that companies around the world rely on.

But the world has changed dramatically – and so have we. The complexity of compliance has exploded. More regulations. More jurisdictions. More risk. And our customers need more than intelligence – they need a way to act on it. As we built our new AI-native platform, and as we readied it for launch, it became clear that the name Compliance & Risks no longer captured who we were becoming. Adherent does.

The name reflects everything we believe: that you can adapt to change and stay in control. That compliance isn’t a constraint – it’s a competitive advantage. That being adherent to what matters – to safety, to sustainability, to your customers – is how the best companies build trust.

The Team That Built This

I’ve worked in People & Culture long enough to know that rebrands are hard. They demand alignment across every corner of an organisation – from legal to engineering, from marketing to People & Culture. What I’ve witnessed here is something genuinely special: a team that showed up for this, with the full weight of our four values behind them.

Trust – our first priority was building a product customers can genuinely rely on. In a market flooded with generic AI, it’s the humans behind the intelligence that no one can replicate. That’s not a limitation in an AI-first world; it’s our edge.
Innovation – from our engineering and product teams building an AI-native platform to our designers crafting a brand identity that feels both bold and precise.
Winning Together – cross-functional teams worked hand-in-hand, because that’s simply how we operate here.
And Respect – for our customers, for the work, and for one another.

That last point matters more than it might sound. The culture at Adherent is one of genuine care. We are a global team with people in Cork, San Francisco, across the US and EU – different time zones, different backgrounds, one shared commitment to the work and to each other. I am enormously proud of what this team has created.

This Moment – and What Comes Next

Today also marks a new chapter in our leadership. We welcome Zack Cable as President and Brian Elmi as our Chief Product Officer – two exceptional leaders who join at exactly the right moment. They bring experience scaling some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world, and they’ve chosen Adherent because they see what we see: a category-defining opportunity, and a team ready to seize it.

Our vision is simple and it doesn’t waver: every consumer enjoys safe, sustainable products. Our mission is to enable companies to deliver trustworthy products and capture growth opportunities worldwide. Those words aren’t marketing – they are the reason people joined this company, and the reason they stay.

We’re growing, and we’re looking for people who share that sense of mission. If you want to do meaningful work on a global stage, with a team that genuinely invests in your development and cares about culture as much as performance, we’d love to hear from you.

This is Adherent. It’s been building for over twenty years. And we’re just getting started.

Welcome to Adherent.