CoComply raises £1.9M to govern the hidden contractor workforce

CoComply, the Alderley Park based workforce compliance platform, has raised £1.9M in a round led by NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance, with Haatch and a group of senior angels, to find and classify the external workers hidden inside supplier contracts.

Contractor compliance is nobody’s favourite line item – and yet it keeps minting venture rounds in Europe this autumn. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, and why the unglamorous end of regtech keeps getting funded.

A £1.9M round led from the Northern Powerhouse

The round, announced on 19 October 2026, was led by NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance, the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II vehicle managed by Mercia Ventures and backed by the British Business Bank. Early stage firm Haatch joined, alongside CoComply’s management team and three angels who know the data and compliance trade from the inside: Richard Law, former chief executive of identity data firm GBG; Seb Timpson, co-founder of With Intelligence; and Stephen Cann of Bollin Group, who becomes chair.

The company attached no stage label to the round – at £1.9M it sits in classic seed territory, but we record it as announced. The capital goes into accelerating product development and scaling sales, marketing and delivery, in the UK first and internationally after.

The lead is worth a second look. NPIF II is the £660M fund the British Business Bank launched in March 2024 to back businesses across the North of England (British Business Bank, March 2024) – exactly the kind of capital that reaches a Cheshire science campus before a London term sheet does.

Thirteen people chasing the hidden workforce

CoComply was incorporated in 2019 by Michael Cleavely and runs with a team of around 13 (LinkedIn, October 2026) out of Alderley Park, the life sciences campus turned startup hub near Macclesfield. The product reads supplier agreements, statements of work and service contracts to surface the individual workers embedded inside them – people doing the work of employees while remaining invisible to HR and procurement. It then determines how each worker should be engaged, and which checks apply under IR35, Right to Work and modern slavery rules, before the work starts rather than after the letter from HMRC arrives.

The traction figures are the company’s own, but they point one way: revenue up 240% in 2025, forecast growth above 120% for 2026, and customer numbers up 300% year on year (company announcement, October 2026). Its customer list runs from the mid-market to the FTSE 100, including Aston Martin, RS Group and Commvault (company website, October 2026).

Remember: since April 2021, the liability for classifying a contractor correctly in the UK private sector sits with the client, not the contractor. That one change turned every procurement department of a medium or large business into an employment status assessor – mostly an unwilling one.

A $1.5bn platform market that enforcement keeps feeding

The segment CoComply sells into – contingent workforce management platforms – was worth $1.51bn globally in 2025 and is forecast to reach $1.92bn by 2031, a 4.16% CAGR over 2026-2031 (Mordor Intelligence, September 2026). The fact is that nobody wakes up wanting workforce governance software; a 4% growth market will never headline a fund’s thesis. Enforcement is the salesperson – every IR35 determination, Right to Work fine and supply chain audit recruits another buyer.

For scale against our own records: Complaion raised €13.5M in late September to automate SME compliance, and Benford took a €5M pre-seed the same week to rebuild the audit itself. CoComply’s £1.9M is the smallest of the three and the most focused: one buyer, one risk, one wedge. Our fundraising data shows compliance rounds like these stacking up month after month.

The quiet compounding of compliance capital

So why does capital keep finding the unglamorous end of enterprise software? Because Europe’s regulatory density – the thing we love to complain about – doubles as a moat. In the US, worker classification battles play out in court, state by state. In the UK and across the EU they are codified, dated and enforced, which means they can be productised. A Macclesfield startup can build against IR35 today knowing the rule will still be there tomorrow.

I keep seeing the same geography in these rounds too: public backed regional capital leading rounds that London funds pass on, in places that never make the ecosystem rankings. The silver lining of an unfashionable category is that it is priced accordingly – and the investors who do show up, like the angels here, tend to come from the trade rather than the trend.

What to watch from here: whether CoComply’s find-the-hidden-worker wedge stretches beyond IR35. The next wave is already drafted – the EU’s platform work directive must be transposed by member states by 2 December 2026, bringing algorithmic worker classification into scope across the bloc. The next IR35 is already written in Brussels. Watch who builds the software for it.