Built from the inside of the problem.

The Afternoon That Changed Everything

I am a Chartered Certified Accountant. I have spent nearly a decade helping other people bring order to their finances. And yet, for years, I spent roughly one full day every week doing exactly what I was supposed to be automating — chasing receipts, reconciling invoices, preparing returns. The irony was not subtle.

But the moment that crystallised everything was not one of those long afternoons buried in spreadsheets. It was a conversation with a contractor client — a talented software developer working through his own limited company — who had just received a letter from HMRC. An IR35 enquiry. He had no documentation. No audit trail. No clear record of why his engagement sat outside IR35. He had done everything right, but he could not prove it.

That was the moment I stopped thinking about the problem as an inconvenience and started thinking about it as a crisis. Across the UK, hundreds of thousands of Ltd company contractors and Personal Service Company directors were operating in a compliance grey zone — not because they were careless, but because the tools available to them were built for a different era. IR35 legislation is complex, consequential, and changing. The software was not keeping up. The accountancy profession was not keeping up. And the contractors were paying the price.

A Broken System, and Who It Was Failing

Here is what the market for UK Ltd contractors looked like when I started building Nebula: you could pay a traditional accountant £200 to £400 a day for support that was largely reactive and rarely proactive. Or you could use off-the-shelf accounting software that had no concept of IR35, no understanding of the contractor lifecycle, and no way to tell you whether your working practices would survive HMRC scrutiny.

The geography of the problem made it worse. Skilled accountants in cities like Leeds, Sheffield, and Manchester — people with real expertise and genuine care for their clients — were struggling to build practices, while contractors in London paid London prices for London postcodes. The talent and the need were there. The infrastructure to connect them was not.

The millions of independent professionals without an accounting qualification behind their name were largely on their own. That felt unacceptable. It still does.

Building the Team

Nebula Finance was built from the ground up on a single principle: intelligent, transparent, and designed to make complex compliance feel simple. That vision required a team that understood both the technology and the financial world it was entering.

The signal that told us we were onto something real came early: alumni from Monzo Bank — as Non-Executive Directors — chose to back Nebula. These were people who had helped redefine what a modern UK financial institution could look like. They did not join for a comfortable next step. They joined because they saw the same opportunity we did, and they wanted to be part of building it.

What We Built, and Why It Matters

Nebula Finance is, today, laser-focused on one market: UK Ltd company contractors and Personal Service Companies. This is a deliberate choice, not a limitation. IR35 compliance is one of the most technically demanding and financially consequential challenges facing any UK contractor. Get it wrong, and the consequences — back taxes, penalties, reputational damage — can be severe. Yet until Nebula, there was no platform built specifically to solve it.

Our IR35 compliance engine does not just flag a risk level and leave you to figure it out. It provides explainable reasoning — step by step, criterion by criterion — along with a full audit trail that can be presented to HMRC if it ever comes to that. We are the only UK platform built this way. That matters when your livelihood is on the line.

Beyond IR35, Nebula handles Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self-Assessment (MTD ITSA) automation, salary and dividend optimisation, and seamless bookkeeping — all through a single platform. At the centre of it all is Claire, our AI concierge, who turns the kind of financial complexity that used to require an expensive adviser into a clear, actionable conversation. And for accountants, our Accountant Marketplace creates something that has never existed before: the infrastructure to serve clients not just locally, but anywhere.

Traction, and What It Tells Us

We are early, and we are honest about that. We have paying customers, a growing cohort of beta users, and more than forty pre-signups from contractors who found us before we even launched fully. We have an IBM co-sell agreement and a referral partnership with Broadbench. These are not vanity metrics — they are proof that the problem is real and that the market has been waiting for a solution built specifically for it.

What this traction tells us is not just that contractors want better tools. It is that they want tools built by people who understand their world — IR35 determinations, off-payroll working rules, the difference between a deemed employee and a genuine business-to-business relationship. They are not looking for a generic software platform that has retrofitted a compliance module. They are looking for a platform built from the ground up with their situation in mind. That is Nebula.

The Road Ahead: Europe, and Beyond

The UK Ltd contractor market is our beachhead. But independent professionals are not a UK-specific phenomenon — they are a global workforce, and the compliance challenges they face exist in every major economy. In Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and across the DACH and Nordic markets, freelancers and contractors navigate IR35-equivalent regimes that are just as complex and just as poorly served by existing tools. That is where Nebula is going next.

After establishing ourselves as the definitive platform for European contractor compliance, we are headed to North America and APAC. The contractor economy is growing in every one of these markets. The infrastructure to support it — intelligent, compliant, genuinely useful financial tooling — is not. We intend to build it.

The Accountant Marketplace is central to this vision. By enabling skilled accountants to serve clients across geographies — not just those within a commutable radius of their office — we close the access gap that has defined this industry for too long. An accountant in Manchester should be able to build a practice serving contractors in Munich or Melbourne. Nebula makes that possible.

Our Mission

We started with one accountant's frustration and one contractor's IR35 letter. We are building towards something much larger: a financial operating system for independent professionals, wherever they are in the world.

Not a tool that automates admin — though it does that. Not a compliance platform — though it is that too. A genuine financial infrastructure for the global independent workforce: intelligent, explainable, and built by people who have lived the problem from both sides of the desk.