Kamma: Inside the Proptech Mapping Every Property Licensing Rule in Britain

Somewhere in Britain, a new property licensing scheme launches roughly every eight days. No two schemes look the same. Boundaries shift at ward level, fees vary by council, and the rules can change without warning. For the landlords and letting agents expected to keep up, the system is close to unmanageable. Kamma, a London-based proptech founded in 2015, has built its entire business on the bet that nobody can do it manually anymore.

The company’s platform tracks every licensing scheme across all 408 local authorities in England, monitoring 36 million properties in real time and alerting users when regulations change. It counts mortgage lenders, surveyors and some of the country’s largest letting agencies among its clients. The licensing landscape it navigates covers three distinct tiers: mandatory HMO licensing for larger shared houses, additional licensing for smaller HMOs at the council’s discretion, and selective licensing, which can require every privately rented property in a designated area to hold a licence. Each tier operates under different rules, and each council implements them differently.

Kamma did not start here. CEO and co-founder Orla Shields originally launched the company as GetRentr, a consumer app connecting tenants, landlords and tradesmen. Shields, a chartered accountant who had managed a £650 million infrastructure budget for the London 2012 Olympics, had struggled to find reliable information about rental properties after moving to the city. She found it easier to research hostels in India than flats in Islington.

But the app quickly revealed a deeper problem. The UK government had devolved responsibility for housing standards to local authorities, creating a sprawling patchwork of licensing rules that varied not just by borough but by street. Landlords were expected to navigate this themselves. Most could not. In 2019, the company rebranded as Kamma, a Sanskrit word meaning “results,” and pivoted entirely to compliance. The rental app that set out to help tenants leave reviews had become a geospatial data engine mapping every regulation in the country.

The technology works by continuously scanning council websites, public registers and regulatory databases, then standardising the information into a single dataset. When a council launches a new scheme, amends boundaries or updates fees, the platform detects the change and flags affected properties. For agencies managing hundreds or thousands of properties across multiple boroughs, this replaces a manual process that previously relied on spreadsheets, phone calls and guesswork.

Kamma’s core product, Kamma Manager, gives letting agencies a 24/7 compliance dashboard that tracks the licensing status of every property in their portfolio, flags high-risk units and sends alerts ahead of renewal deadlines. The company also handles licence applications on behalf of agents and, through a partnership with the National Residential Landlords Association, provides the NRLA’s 90,000 members with free licensing monitoring for up to 16 properties. An API layer allows property management platforms to embed compliance checks directly into their workflows, and partnerships with referencing platform Veri-Check and estate agent Purplebricks have woven Kamma’s data into the pre-tenancy process.

Beyond licensing, the company’s data engine extends into energy performance, ESG risk and climate analytics, providing mortgage lenders and capital markets participants with property-level insights on transition risk and financed emissions. The UK property sector accounts for roughly 25% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, and Kamma’s environmental data helped attract Clean Growth Fund as lead investor in its most recent raise.

The regulatory tailwind behind the business has only intensified. In 2025, 49 new selective and additional licensing schemes came into force, a record. Sixteen more are confirmed for 2026. The pace accelerated after the government removed the requirement for councils to seek Secretary of State approval before introducing new schemes, regardless of their size, making it significantly easier for local authorities to press ahead. Data published by the company last year revealed that the top 50 councils generated £327 million in licensing fees from over 389,000 licensed properties. London dominates, with 28 of the capital’s 32 boroughs now enforcing schemes. Southwark alone has collected over £23 million in licensing revenue.

Enforcement is tightening in parallel. London landlords received £13 million in licensing fines between 2018 and 2025, and penalties are set to rise sharply under the Renters’ Rights Act, which takes effect in May 2026. The act increases maximum fines to £40,000 for serious offences and doubles rent repayment orders to 24 months, meaning tenants can claw back two years of rent from non-compliant landlords. A new national Private Rented Sector Database, expected in late 2026, will make identifying unlicensed properties far easier. The political stakes were underscored in October 2025 when Chancellor Rachel Reeves acknowledged she had let out a property without the required selective licence, blaming an oversight by her letting agent.

Kamma is not alone in the broader compliance space. Property management platforms like Landlord Vision and Arthur Online have added compliance features, and general landlord software increasingly includes licensing reminders. But none offer what Kamma claims as its core advantage: a continuously updated, real-time map of every licensing scheme in the country, built on proprietary geospatial infrastructure. CTO Gary Gale, who previously served as CTO of what3words and held senior geospatial roles at Yahoo, Nokia HERE Maps and Ordnance Survey, has been central to building that technical foundation.

The company has raised approximately £5.8 million across three rounds. A £1.6 million seed round in 2020 was led by Triple Point, with participation from Pi Labs, Europe’s most active proptech venture capital firm. In 2023, Kamma raised £3.6 million in a round led by Clean Growth Fund, joined by Triple Point, Pi Labs, Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Kiilto Ventures. Modest numbers by venture standards, but the company has built its coverage of the entire UK licensing landscape on that capital.

With 49 new schemes last year, fines rising and a national database on the horizon, the market Kamma serves is growing faster than at any point in its history. For a company that started as a rental app, the pivot has paid off.