CoComply raises £1.9m to find the contractors companies cannot see

The Cheshire start-up’s round comes three weeks after the UK widened Right to Work checks to subcontractors, with fines of up to £60,000 per worker for businesses further up the chain.

CoComply, a compliance software company based at Alderley Park in Cheshire, has raised £1.9m to expand a platform that identifies workers buried inside companies’ supplier contracts and works out which legal checks apply to them.

The round was led by NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance, managed by Mercia Ventures as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, alongside the venture firm Haatch and private investors. They include Richard Law, former chief executive of the identity data group GBG, who becomes chair; Seb Timpson, co-founder of With Intelligence, which S&P Global acquired for $1.8bn; and Stephen Cann, chief executive of Bollin Group. The money will go on product development and on building sales, marketing and delivery.

The deal is modest by venture standards. Its timing is less so. On October 1, new rules under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 extended Right to Work obligations beyond employees to cover people on worker contracts, individual subcontractors and those engaged through online matching platforms, including gig workers. A new extended liability regime means a business can face a civil penalty of up to £60,000 for each illegal worker found in its subcontracting chain, even without a direct relationship with that worker. The rules apply only to engagements beginning on or after October 1.

That change adds a second regulatory pressure to one companies have lived with since 2021. Under the off-payroll working rules, known as IR35, medium and large private-sector clients decide whether a contractor working through their own company should be taxed like an employee. HMRC estimated in February 2025 that around 120,000 workers were likely affected by the April 2021 reform, which it says generated about £4.2bn in additional tax, National Insurance and Apprenticeship Levy payments up to the end of March 2023. In a written answer in June, the Treasury said there were no current plans for a further review of the reforms.

Both regimes assume a company knows who is doing its work. CoComply’s argument is that many do not. Workers supplied by consultancies, agencies and service providers often sit within statements of work and service contracts, while responsibility for them is divided among HR, procurement, finance and legal teams.

“Despite growing reliance on external workers in every industry, many businesses still struggle to answer a very basic question: how many people actually work for us, what are they doing and how are they engaged?” said Michael Cleavely, the company’s founder and chief executive.

Cleavely says he encountered the problem directly. While he was running an IT consultancy after the 2021 IR35 reforms, a large enterprise client asked for help understanding its contractor population, an exercise that meant manually analysing thousands of lines of supplier data. He had previously founded the workforce consultancy Triple Seven, which he sold to Experis, ManpowerGroup’s professional resourcing arm.

The platform combines automation with specialist reviewers to classify workers and flag the checks required for IR35, Right to Work and modern slavery rules. CoComply says revenue grew 240 percent in 2025 and forecasts growth of more than 120 percent this year, with customer numbers up 300 percent year on year. It names clients including Aston Martin, Take-Two, RS Group, Thredd, Quint Group, Dementia UK and the Royal Yachting Association. The figures are the company’s own; it has not disclosed absolute revenue or customer counts. It received an Innovate UK Smart Grant in 2024.

Maurice Disasi of Mercia Ventures said what stood out to the fund was “the scale of the problem and how poorly it is currently addressed.” Marwa Ebrahim, an associate at Haatch, pointed to the team’s first-hand understanding of the problem and the traction it had built.

The competitive picture is less settled than the regulatory one. Larger platforms already sell contractor compliance. Deel, valued at $17.3bn after a $300m raise in October 2025, offers contractor management for people hired and paid through its own system. That model starts from workers a company engages directly rather than those embedded in third-party supplier contracts, which is the gap CoComply targets. Payroll, HR and procurement vendors could still add worker classification to existing products.

Integration is the practical test. CoComply’s pitch rests on pulling together data from procurement, HR and finance systems that rarely share it, and that fragmentation is also what makes the product hard to build. With the new Right to Work rules in force and Home Office guidance on extended liability now applying to new engagements, the company has £1.9m to show that large employers will pay for a dedicated layer rather than wait for their existing suppliers to offer one.