Kotini: The Million-Dollar Proptech Fixing Estate Agent Compliance

Perry Rose used to spend the first hour of every new instruction doing the same thing: chasing ID documents, generating AML reports, sending contracts, collecting signatures and pulling together the property disclosures that regulators now expect before a listing goes live. Rose, who owns Gilbert & Rose estate agents, describes the shift since adopting Kotini in blunter terms. “It’s like having an extra person in the team,” he says. That sentence, from an independent agent watching every line on his payroll, is the closest thing a startup can get to a product endorsement.

Kotini is a UK-based proptech company that consolidates the entire estate agent onboarding process into a single branded digital workflow. Identity verification, anti-money laundering screening, contract signing, material information collection, GDPR consent and payment processing all happen in one place. The agent triggers it from inside their CRM with a few clicks. The client receives a link, completes everything on their phone, and the data syncs back without anyone re-keying a field. The company claims it compresses over two hours of admin into roughly 60 seconds of agent time.

Founded by Kieran Witt, the company has raised sub-seven-figures from backers including Geovation, the accelerator programme backed by Ordnance Survey and HM Land Registry, alongside SFC Capital, SantanderX and Innovate UK. PitchBook puts the total at approximately $920,000, though the company has not publicly confirmed a precise figure. What is notable is the efficiency of the spend. The startup has built a working product, signed hundreds of agencies and secured integration partnerships with major CRM platforms on a capital base that would barely cover a Series A company’s annual cloud bill.

The market it is targeting is large and fragmented. There are roughly 25,800 estate agency businesses operating in the UK, a number that has grown 24% since 2017. The vast majority are independents and small regional chains. The industry’s largest operator, Connells Group, runs over 80 brands, but the typical UK agency is a one-to-three-office operation with local expertise and limited technology budget. These firms do not have the resources to build proprietary onboarding systems. When new compliance requirements arrive, and they keep arriving, these agents absorb the burden manually. The cost of that inefficiency is not abstract. Roughly 250,000 property transactions fell through across the UK in 2025, many due to administrative delays, missing information and the kind of duplicated processes that slow entire chains to a crawl.

That burden increased materially in late 2023, when National Trading Standards published new Material Information Guidance requiring agents to disclose detailed property-level data upfront. Flood risk, planning constraints, tenure, council tax band, broadband speed and more must now be gathered and presented before a buyer makes a decision. For agents already juggling separate systems for ID checks, AML and contract management, adding another layer of form-filling was the tipping point. Kotini had built for exactly this moment. Its platform was already structured around the Property Data Trust Framework, meaning it could absorb the new requirements without forcing agents to adopt yet another tool.

The company’s distribution strategy is built on CRM integrations. Kotini is now embedded inside Rex Software, Alto, Street.co.uk and Apex27, the platforms that agents already open every morning. That matters because CRM-adjacent tools in estate agency tend to stick. Once an agent is running onboarding through the platform inside their existing workflow, ripping it out means reintroducing the friction the platform was designed to eliminate. Each new integration widens the moat.

Witt, who also serves as an inaugural executive committee member of the Open Property Data Association and took home Digital Startup of the Year at the 2023 UK Startup Awards, has been deliberate about where his company sits in the broader property transaction. The platform is not just collecting compliance data for agents. It is structuring that data in a format that can be passed downstream to mortgage brokers, conveyancers and other parties in the chain. Witt has said the goal is to help agents spend their time on the work that actually drives revenue, rather than the compliance admin that keeps growing around them. But the longer play is clear. If Kotini becomes the system of record for onboarding data across a meaningful share of UK transactions, it stops being a compliance tool and becomes infrastructure.

The numbers support the ambition. The UK property market recorded nearly 1.2 million residential transactions in 2025, the highest total in three years. That works out to roughly 100,000 completed sales a month. The total value of UK residential property stands at approximately £9.18 trillion. Yet the technology connecting buyers, sellers, agents, brokers and solicitors still runs largely on PDFs, email attachments and manual data entry. The mismatch between the scale of the market and the sophistication of the tools serving it is difficult to overstate.

Kotini charges £49 per listing on its standard plan, or nothing if the agent passes the fee to the client. There are no long-term contracts. The pricing is transactional by design, tying the company’s revenue directly to market activity. In a year with 1.2 million transactions, even modest penetration translates into meaningful recurring income. And the regulatory direction only adds tailwind. The government’s Digital Property Market Steering Group has set explicit objectives around faster, more transparent home sales, underpinned by better upfront information. Every policy step in that direction makes the product harder to ignore.

The risk is familiar. Kotini is a small team operating in a market where larger, better-capitalised players could decide the opportunity is worth pursuing. The CRM platforms it integrates with could build competing features in-house. Established compliance providers like Thirdfort or Credas, which already handle ID and AML for parts of the legal and property sector, could expand their scope to cover the full onboarding workflow the startup now owns. The company’s advantage is that it got there first, priced it accessibly and wired itself into the infrastructure agents depend on daily. Whether that is enough depends on how quickly it can convert early traction into the kind of market position that makes catching up more expensive than partnering.

For now, every time a home changes hands in the UK, somebody has to do the paperwork. Somebody has to verify the buyer, screen the seller, sign the contracts and compile the disclosures. For decades, that somebody was an agent with a stack of forms and a list of logins. Kotini is making a bet that it should be the one doing it instead. At £49 a time, across a market of 1.2 million annual transactions, the maths is not complicated. The execution is everything.