- UK startup CoComply has raised £1.9M to find contractors hidden inside supplier contracts.
- It reports 240% revenue growth in 2025 and 300% year-on-year customer growth.
- The raise follows October 1 changes that widened Right to Work checks to some contractors.
CoComply, a UK compliance startup that has raised £1.9 million to find contractors hidden inside supplier agreements. Mercia Equity Finance, the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II vehicle that Mercia Ventures manages, led the round, along with early-stage investor Haatch.
Management and other investors joined, including Richard Law, a former chief executive of identity data firm GBG; Seb Timpson, co-founder of private markets data provider with Intelligence, which S&P Global bought for $1.8 billion in a deal that closed in November 2025; and Stephen Cann of Macclesfield’s Bollin Group, who will become chair. The money will go on product development and on sales, marketing, and delivery in the UK and abroad.
“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? That becomes a serious governance and compliance problem when responsibility is spread across business functions. Our mission is to provide the decision and governance layer across these teams, helping them choose the right engagement model and classify work correctly from the outset,” said Michael Cleavely, founder and CEO of CoComply.
Cleavely previously co-founded recruiter Triple Seven with David Hood. Experis, the professional resourcing arm of ManpowerGroup, took a majority stake in the business in a deal announced in January 2014.
A blind spot with a tax bill attached
The startup, incorporated in 2019, aims to find the individual workers embedded in a company’s supplier agreements, statements of work, and service contracts. It then helps work out how each person should be engaged and classified, and which checks apply under IR35, Right to Work, and modern slavery rules. The platform combines automation with specialist expertise, the company says.
IR35 is the UK’s off-payroll working rules, which decide whether someone working through their own company should be taxed like an employee. Since April 2021, medium and large private-sector clients, not the contractors, have had to make that call.
HM Revenue and Customs estimated in February 2025 that around 120,000 workers were likely affected. A June 2026 Treasury answer to a parliamentary question said the tax authority’s analysis put the extra revenue at about £4.2 billion in tax, National Insurance, and Apprenticeship Levy payments by the end of March 2023.
The second rule is newer. On October 1, the Right to Work scheme, which requires employers to check that people can legally work in the UK, widened beyond employees to cover individual subcontractors and some people engaged through online matching services.
Neither rule works for workers a company cannot see. That gap is the market CoComply is going after.
Why Mercia and Haatch backed CoComply
“Organisations increasingly rely on outsourcing, yet many lack a clear understanding of who is delivering the work. What stood out to us was the scale of the problem and how poorly it is currently addressed. CoComply’s ability to identify and classify hidden workers differentiates it from other solutions and positions the business well as regulation and governance requirements continue to increase,” said Mauricei Disasi, investment manager at Mercia Ventures. Mercia Ventures also led UK advice-software startup PlannerPal’s $6 million round in October.
“CoComply is tackling a significant and often overlooked challenge for businesses, with a platform that gives organisations much-needed visibility and control over their external workforce. We’ve been impressed by the team’s first-hand understanding of the problem, the traction they’ve built and the opportunity to establish a new standard for workforce compliance,” added Marwa Ebrahim, associate at Haatch, which says it has backed more than 200 early-stage companies.
Rivals sit next door rather than head-to-head.Delve, a US startup that automates security and privacy compliance, raised a $32 million Series A in July 2025 at a $300 million valuation. In March 2026, an anonymous Substack post accused it of misleading customers about their compliance status. Delve disputes the claims and says it does not issue compliance reports. Deel raised $300 million at a $17.3 billion valuation in October 2025 to fund acquisitions, AI, and its global payroll infrastructure, and already sells contractor management and compliance for people companies hire and pay through its platform.
Neither appears to target workers hidden inside supplier contracts.
Can CoComply turn growth into a defensible lead?
CoComply says revenue grew 240% in 2025 and forecasts more than 120% growth in 2026. Customer numbers rose 300% year on year, and clients range from mid-market firms to FTSE 100 companies, including Aston Martin, Take-Two, RS Group, Thredd, Quint Group, Dementia UK, and the Royal Yachting Association, it says.
The market is large and hard to size. Grand View Research puts global RegTech, or regulatory technology, at $24.3 billion in 2025 and forecasts about $112.1 billion by 2033, a 21.1% annual growth rate from 2026.
Investors keep funding the wider RegTech field. Tech Funding News has covered Formalize’s € 30 million for governance, risk, and compliance software, Kertos’ € 14 million for AI compliance in Europe, and Sphinx’s $7.1 million for AI compliance agents in banking.
CoComply’s job now is to turn that growth into repeatable expansion abroad while connecting to procurement, HR, and finance systems that rarely share data. Its own investor page lists fragmented data across systems and contracts as the reason traditional tools fail, which is also what makes the problem hard to solve.
The open question is whether companies will pay for a separate governance layer or wait for their payroll, HR, and procurement vendors to add worker classification. CoComply now has £1.9 million to show that a dedicated layer beats an add-on feature.
