Sonovate review 2026: contractor funding, and what the marketing and the contract each say

What Sonovate actually does

Sonovate Limited, Companies House 07500445, was incorporated on 20 January 2011 as Rectrader Limited and is registered at 4th Floor Golate House, 101 St. Mary Street, Cardiff. It was founded in 2013 by Richard Prime and Damon Chapple and pivoted the following year into funding the contingent labour market.

The mechanism is timesheet-driven. A contractor submits a timesheet, the end client approves it, Sonovate raises the invoice, and up to 100% of the contract profit is released to the agency while Sonovate handles candidate payroll, client invoicing and collection. In legal terms it is a sale, not a loan: “You assign to Us with full title guarantee each Commencement Debt and every Debt that comes into existence after the Commencement Date”, with the sale described as absolute, irrevocable and made without recourse. The website says 95% bad debt protection is included as standard.

The platform runs beyond funding: perm, contract, PAYE and statement of work in one place, timesheets, APIs, instant credit checks and a skills marketplace. Placements are funded across more than 40 countries in multiple currencies, which is the reason a consultancy placing people in three jurisdictions ends up here rather than with a domestic factor. There is no repayment schedule at all, because there is nothing to repay: Sonovate collects from the end client and settles the balance, netting off fees, dilutions and liabilities under its set-off provisions.

The price, which is nowhere on the website

No rate, percentage or fee schedule appears anywhere on sonovate.com. What the site does say is what is not charged: no set-up fees, no service fees, no audit fees, no credit check fees, no annual renewal premiums, no credit limit fees.

The published Recruitment Purchase Conditions name the charge. It is the Purchase Fee, defined as “The charge for Our purchasing each Debt from You at a discount”, set in the Proposal rather than in the Conditions and deducted from each payment of the purchase price. Three features of that fee matter more than its absence from the website. It is variable and formulaic: “If there is any change in Bank of England base rate, the Purchase Fee will increase or decrease by 0.1% for every 0.25% change in the base rate”, with no change if base rate falls below 0.5%. It can be renegotiated: Sonovate is “entitled to renegotiate the Purchase Fee with You if You agree with any Client to extend Your Standard Payment Terms”. And it is payable regardless of collection: “The Purchase Fee will be payable by You even if the Client does not make full payment of the Debt.”

That last clause sits awkwardly beside the without-recourse framing and the 95% bad debt protection, and it is the sort of thing worth understanding before a first placement rather than after a client fails. There is also a payment fee plus bank charges, a permanent debt collection fee, and default interest at 4% above Bank of England base rate on all liabilities due. The Conditions on the site are dated 17 June 2022 and are the funding-only version, so current pricing and terms may differ, and Condition 62 lets Sonovate change any term on 30 days' notice.

Three places the marketing and the contract disagree

The notice period is the biggest. Sonovate's comparison page says newly set up or small businesses benefit from rolling contracts and “only a 30-day notice period to exit”, and elsewhere it says “We don't tie you into long contracts.” Condition 54 of the published Recruitment Purchase Conditions says the agreement “continues until terminated by either party giving written notice of not less than 90 days ending on a Sunday”. Ninety days, and it has to land on a Sunday, which in practice can add most of another week. That is three months of exit rather than one.

The second is credit limits. The invoice finance page says “We won't place a credit limit on you!” Conditions 18 to 24 set Purchase Limits and Credit Limits per client, and allow Sonovate to reduce them or withdraw them. Both statements come from Sonovate. Only one of them is in the document you sign.

The third is speed, which is smaller but tells the same story. The homepage promises funds “within 24 hours” and up to 100% of invoice value “as quickly as under 24 hours”, while another page on the same site says you can withdraw payments and receive the funds “within just one or two business days”. Onboarding time is not quantified anywhere.

None of this makes the facility a bad one for an agency that needs it. It does mean the Conditions, not the marketing pages, are the description of what you are buying.

The accounts, reported exactly as filed

This section needs care, so we are going to quote rather than characterise. Sonovate Limited's accounts for the year to 31 December 2024, filed on 3 October 2025, carry an auditor's report drawing attention to going concern. The auditor's words: “We draw attention to note 1.2 to the financial statements which indicates that the Company will require additional equity funding and/or commitment to meet its next debt covenants test and require that existing funding facilities to be renewed within the going concern period. At the time of approving the financial statements, the process to renew existing facilities as well as raise additional equity and/or commitment has commenced but has not been secured. Therefore, these events and conditions, along with the other matters explained in note 1.2, constitute a material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt on the Company's ability to continue as a going concern. Our opinion is not modified in respect of this matter.”

The same accounts record net current liabilities of £21,537,997 and total net liabilities of £14,121,342, a loss before taxation of £5,675,881, and statutory turnover of £19,723,618. The strategic report in the same document states revenue of £26,454,127, which does not match the statutory turnover line; we report both because both are in the filing. Volume was substantial: £1,258,841,922 of invoices processed and funded during 2024, and over £6bn cumulatively.

Note 1.2 describes the facilities in question. A private securitisation of £150m of senior notes held by a large European bank, increased to £200m in August 2023 through a loan syndication, and £30m of mezzanine notes issued to a UK asset manager, extended to £40m, both running to a renewal date of 19 December 2025. Separately a revolving loan facility of £20m, extended to £30m and then to 27 December 2025. Additional equity of £5m was raised from existing investors between March and May 2024, and the next refinancing and potential equity injection were expected to complete in the second half of 2025. The group structure runs through an Irish bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle, Sonovate Trade Receivables Designated Activity Company, with class A notes held by BNP Paribas and Lloyds Bank at up to an 82% advance rate and class B mezzanine notes held by M&G at up to 93%.

Here is the honest position on what happened next. Sonovate's newsroom carries no press releases from 2025 or 2026, its next accounts were not filed when we checked, and we found no public statement confirming or denying that the facilities were renewed or the equity raised. So we do not know, and we are not going to guess in either direction. What we do is ask for a current funding position before we place a case here, and any business considering a multi-year purchase agreement can ask Sonovate the same question directly. A borrower owes a funder rather than the other way round, and an agency that has already been paid is not at risk from its funder's balance sheet; the practical question is continuity of funding for next month's payroll.

The rest of the contract worth reading

Confidentiality is conditional in the way most invoice purchase agreements are: “We will not notify Clients of the assignment of Debts unless a Termination Event occurs.” So the end client sees the arrangement only if things go wrong, which for a recruitment agency protecting a hard-won account is the right way round.

Set-off is wide. Under Condition 39 Sonovate can set off all fees and charges due under the agreement, any dilutions and all liabilities against the purchase price, which means the amount that actually reaches the agency each week is a net figure. Guarantees are the one place the Conditions are ambiguous: no personal guarantee wording appears anywhere on the website, and the Conditions do not require one, but they do treat “the termination of a guarantee of Your Liabilities” as a termination event, which implies guarantees are taken in at least some cases. We could not establish the general position, so we do not state one.

Eligibility is unusually open. No minimum trading history, minimum turnover or structure requirement is published. Sonovate says it provides invoice finance for new businesses and works with everything “from startups to £150m+ enterprises”, with named vertical pages for education recruitment and transport and logistics recruitment among others. The constraint is sector rather than size: this is for recruitment, consultancies, freelance and labour marketplaces and employer-of-record businesses, and a general trading company will not fit the model however good its ledger looks.

On regulation, no FCA statement and no firm reference number appear on the site or in the Conditions. Invoice finance to businesses is generally outside the FCA perimeter, so no permission is required, and the consequence for a client is the usual one: the contract is the protection, and the Financial Ombudsman Service is not available.