£1.9m · Other round · HRtech · Macclesfield, United Kingdom
Macclesfield-based CoComply has raised £1.9m in a funding round to develop its external workforce compliance platform and expand its sales, marketing and delivery capacity in the UK and internationally. The round was led by NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance and Haatch, with participation from Richard Law, Seb Timpson, Stephen Cann, management and other investors.
Finding the workforce hidden in supplier spend
Large organisations can usually count their direct employees, but people delivering work through consultancies, agencies and service contracts are harder to see. Responsibility is often split across procurement, HR, finance and legal, while the underlying worker may be buried in a statement of work or supplier invoice. That creates a practical gap: a company can approve a service contract without having one consistent view of who is doing the work, how they are engaged or which checks apply.
CoComply’s platform analyses supplier and engagement data, identifies external workers, recommends an engagement route, classifies the work and determines controls including IR35 status, Right to Work and modern-slavery checks. The company describes the product as a decision and governance layer that combines automation with specialist review, rather than replacing the vendor-management systems or managed-service providers that already handle contracts and day-to-day workforce operations.
The commercial mechanism is visibility before remediation. If CoComply can surface hidden headcount and route each engagement through the right process when work first enters the business, customers can address classification and documentation risk before an audit or tax dispute. The difficult part is preserving that judgement as deployments grow: classification depends on the facts of each engagement, so automation has to make expert review more scalable without turning nuanced decisions into a box-ticking exercise.
Enterprise traction, followed by a distribution test
CoComply says its customers range from mid-market organisations to FTSE 100 companies, including Aston Martin, Take-Two, RS Group, Thredd, Quint Group, Dementia UK and the Royal Yachting Association. According to the investor announcement, revenue grew 240% in 2025 and customer expansion grew 300% year on year; the company forecasts revenue growth above 120% in 2026. Those are company-reported figures, but they indicate that the product is moving beyond a narrow compliance assessment into an operating layer used across multiple business functions.
Founder and CEO Michael Cleavely built the first version of the approach after an enterprise client asked his IT consultancy to make sense of thousands of supplier-data lines following the 2021 IR35 reforms. He had previously founded workforce consultancy Triple Seven and sold it to Experis Manpower in 2013. The new funding will test whether that domain knowledge can become a repeatable product and go-to-market motion across more customers and jurisdictions, where the applicable rules and evidence requirements differ.
Sources checked:
CoComply announcement · Mercia Ventures · CoComply product guide · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
