Richard Prime had built a business that offered recruiters almost everything they needed to set up on their own. Website management. Branding. Customer software. Timesheets. Finance. A small agency could arrive with ambition and leave with the machinery of a company. Then prospective customers began asking an awkwardly helpful question: could they have the finance without the rest?
There are less flattering ways to receive product feedback. Prime had customers who liked the original service, a team delivering it and money already invested in its technology. The request implied that the most useful thing inside his carefully assembled package might deserve a business of its own. A founder can spend years trying to make people understand an idea. Here were people explaining which idea they wanted to buy.
He and his co-founder, Damon Chapple, changed course. Contract finance became the centre of Sonovate. Their first invoice funding followed in 2014. Today, Prime remains co-founder and co-CEO of a company that reports more than £8 billion funded since that year. The interesting part of his story begins before the billions, with the willingness to let a customer rearrange the plan.
Fifteen years before the first invoice
Prime came to entrepreneurship through recruitment. He joined staffing group SThree in 1996 and spent around 15 years in the agency world before launching Sonovate. Chapple also held senior leadership roles there. They had seen the financial problem from the side of the businesses doing the hiring, where a successful placement brings a payment obligation along with the celebratory handshake.
A contractor finishes the work and expects to be paid. The recruitment agency’s client pays later. Add more contractors and the agency must find more cash before it receives the corresponding income. A busy sales team can therefore produce a peculiarly uncomfortable result: more business, more wages to advance and more money waiting in somebody else’s accounts department.
Prime’s objection was that conventional finance did too little to accommodate the rhythm of this particular trade. He knew the recruiter’s end of the transaction. That experience supplied both the initial market and the irritation that kept him in it. He was moving into a different industry while continuing to work on a problem his old industry understood extremely well.
The customer edits the business plan
The early Sonovate bundled support for small recruitment firms. Prime described its commercial launch as early 2012; the company dates its founding to 2011. Its change of direction came from enquiries for standalone contract finance. The founders investigated and decided that the narrower offer could sustain a more viable business.
There was a practical cost to changing their minds. They had existing customers to serve while new technology was being developed. They needed to move those customers across and persuade the market to recognise the revised business. Work already paid for did not conveniently become free because the strategy had improved.
Prime’s advice afterwards was to stay open to the possibility that the opportunity lay somewhere other than the original idea. He also stressed the value of investors who backed the people making the decisions. His account gives the team credit for agreeing on the move. Plan B became a shared commercial decision, with customers supplying the reason to make it.
First, persuade someone to fund the funder
There is a particular awkwardness in building a finance company that cannot persuade a bank to finance it. Prime has described being turned down by three large UK banks even after passing due diligence. His account of those rejections is blunt: they did not sufficiently understand the business model.
Paul Birch, the technology entrepreneur associated with Bebo, did. He invested £4 million. For Prime, the attraction of angel investment extended beyond the cheque to advice, introductions and the freedom to adapt. His later guidance to other founders mixed persistence with preparation: confidence might start a conversation, but detailed command of the business had to carry it through.
By 2015, Sonovate also had a £10 million funding line from American bank PNC. In 2019 it announced a £110 million debt-and-equity package led by M&G Investments, with participation from MXB Holdings, Dawn Capital and Rocket Internet. The business that had struggled to obtain finance was assembling the capital to provide it to others.
The distinction between these numbers matters. Capital raised to support lending is different from money advanced to customers, and neither is a founder’s personal fortune. Sonovate reached £1 billion in cumulative invoice funding in 2019 and £3 billion in 2022. Those figures describe the work passing through the business. Each total contains many ordinary payment deadlines.
One payment deadline, repeated.
A partnership with 150 miles of elbow room
Prime and Chapple did not require adjoining desks to run their company. Prime worked from London; Chapple headed the Cardiff office. In his account of managing the arrangement, Prime put the distance between them at 150 miles. That could have been a recurring management excuse. Instead, they organised the company around it.
Their working practices included board meetings on Google Hangouts, project coordination through Trello and Slack, and shared documents stored in the cloud. The applications are a period detail. The management choice underneath them is more durable: colleagues needed access to the same information wherever they happened to be working.
Prime paired that flexibility with regular conversations, social events and face-to-face contact. He also described offering equity to key personnel. Distance did not remove the obligation to make people feel part of the enterprise. It required more deliberate attention to it.
His own 2015 description of working life contained an iPhone that was rarely out of reach, journeys between the two cities, and meetings with customers and prospective investors. “I’d be lost without it!” he said of the phone. It is an appropriately unceremonious accessory for a business built around keeping things moving.
What happens when a customer rings Rich
Ashley Lawrence, founder of recruitment group Trinnovo, offers a more personal view of Prime at work. The two have known each other since the early days of their businesses. Lawrence describes calling Rich for introductions, suggestions of potential partners and conversations about planning. The relationship reaches beyond the formal funding arrangement.
That account helps explain what long experience in recruitment can contribute to a finance business. A customer’s next question may concern an overseas market or a person worth meeting. Knowing how to assess an invoice is useful. Knowing somebody who has wrestled with the same expansion problem can be useful too. Lawrence’s description places Prime in both conversations.
Melior Resourcing’s founders, Mark and Patrick Collins, make a related observation about the company. They credit Prime and Chapple’s recruitment backgrounds with influencing the service, including how credit control handles collections. Asking for money on behalf of a recruiter also means speaking to that recruiter’s client. The tone of the call has commercial consequences.
These are relationships with people who have other businesses to run and their own reputations to protect. In their accounts, the founders’ experience shows up in specific acts: an introduction, a planning discussion, a sensitive collection process. The connection between a founder’s biography and a customer’s day is unusually easy to trace.
Hiring people for the awkward chapters
Prime’s writing about recruitment gives another indication of how he approaches management. In 2016 he argued that potential employees should hear about the challenges ahead, including through the experiences of people already inside the business. A polished destination was less useful than an honest account of the work required to get there.
He wrote that one of his hiring criteria was whether candidates seemed “hungry for the journey”. Behind the phrase was a practical concern about mismatched expectations. People who join with an inaccurate picture of a company may leave once the real job becomes clear. Employees’ own stories could help applicants decide earlier whether they would fit.
There is a connection to his experience of changing Sonovate’s direction. A company that revises its product needs colleagues who understand that the work will evolve. His hiring argument makes room for the difficult chapters while the applicant still has a choice about joining. Recruitment, for Prime, remains something people should enter with their eyes open.
“hungry for the journey”
Richard Prime, on a quality he looks for when hiring, 2016
The billions still come down to a payday
By 2021, Prime was describing a customer base that extended beyond recruitment agencies to consultancies and online freelance marketplaces. The common problem travelled well: businesses organising independent work needed dependable access to money so they could pay the people delivering it. A different sort of customer could still have a familiar cash-flow headache.
Sonovate’s larger customers brought more complex requirements. Its 2023 enterprise platform was designed for large recruitment organisations operating across markets. Group structures, multiple currencies and visibility over funding made the problem wider than a single agency’s weekly payroll. Prime’s original sector knowledge remained relevant, but the technology had to accommodate businesses with more moving parts.
The capital behind that expansion continued to change. On 4 March 2026, Sonovate announced a new £210 million, three-year facility supported by DZ BANK and M&G. It said funding was available in nine currencies. For a staffing business taking on international contracts, the duration and capacity of a funding arrangement can shape how confidently it accepts the next piece of work.
Prime’s ambitions have consistently returned to connecting finance with the systems businesses already use. On Matt Alder’s Recruiting Future podcast in 2023, he recalled that Sonovate had been combining workflow technology and working capital before the phrase embedded finance became the usual description. The label arrived after the practical arrangement.
That is a useful place to leave him: still running the company with Chapple, still working within the trade that supplied his original insight, and still tying an abstract financial service to a very concrete obligation. A contractor has done the work. An agency needs to make the payment. Prime’s first business plan contained a great deal more. His customers helped him notice how much could be built around that one moment.
A three-year funding facility supported by DZ BANK and M&G. Sonovate reported funding available in nine currencies.