Dwelly: The AI Platform Buying and Scaling UK Letting Agencies

Three former ride-hailing executives have raised over £69illion to do something counterintuitive: buy traditional UK letting agencies, one by one, and run them all on a single AI operating system. Dwelly, the London-based proptech startup behind the strategy, has acquired 10 agencies and crossed 10,000 properties under management in under two years. It is betting that the most fragmented corner of British real estate can be consolidated faster than anyone in the sector expects.

The Founders’ Bet

CEO Ilya Drozdov was a General Manager at Uber across Continental Europe and later co-founded a tech-enabled rental agency in Eastern Europe that scaled to 10,000 apartments. Chief Product Officer Dan Lifshits held the GM and VP Marketplace roles at rival firm Gett, overseeing £200 million in gross merchandise value. CTO Dmitry Khanukov led Uber’s EMEA recruitment technology and holds a Master’s in Applied Informatics specialising in AI. The three were competitors in the mid-2010s ride-hailing wars before uniting around a shared thesis: that UK lettings, a sector still run on phone calls and spreadsheets, could absorb the same operational intensity they had built for 24/7 logistics platforms.

Own the Agency, Own the Margin

Dwelly considered and rejected the SaaS route. Selling software to letting agencies captures perhaps 1.5 to 2% of an agency’s P&L, according to the founders. Owning the agency captures 100%. Agencies are also reluctant to change established workflows voluntarily, which makes adoption slow and churn high. So the model is acquisition-first: buy the business, preserve the local brand and staff, then plug everything into a proprietary AI platform that the company controls end to end.

What Selling to Dwelly Looks Like

The acquisition pitch is aimed at independent agency owners approaching retirement or struggling to modernise on their own. Many of the UK’s 20,000 letting firms are small, family-run operations built over decades. Succession planning is a persistent gap: owners want to exit, but selling to a private equity firm or a larger corporate chain typically means losing the brand and watching staff get cut.

Dwelly positions itself as the alternative. Sellers receive competitive valuations and clear deal terms. The local brand stays. The management team stays. Client relationships carry over intact.

The integration follows a structured 60-day playbook run by a dedicated team whose sole job is to onboard each new agency and move on to the next. Day one involves mapping internal tools, records and workflows. By day 60, every underlying process, from preparing properties and finding tenants to collecting payments and handling maintenance, runs on the AI platform. The agents keep doing what they are good at: relationships and local knowledge. Everything else gets automated behind the scenes.

That playbook was forged during the first deal. In late 2024, all three founders relocated to Hull to integrate Lime Property, a firm with £1.2 million in revenue and 15 staff managing around 1,000 properties. The move doubled as a crash course in how agencies actually operate day to day. It also produced a key hire: Sam Humphreys, Lime Property’s former owner and managing director, took equity in Dwelly and now leads the entire acquisition pipeline as Head of M&A.

Post-integration, the AI layer starts delivering the numbers that justify the deal. Dwelly self-reports generating an average of 10 validated offers per property within three days, compared with the one or two a traditional agency typically produces. Time to find a tenant has dropped from the industry standard of roughly three weeks to under two, according to the company. On the property management side, chatbots triage tenant requests around the clock and automated workflows chase maintenance providers, cutting average resolution times from about 50 days to 20 with a stated target of getting below 10. Over 80% of customers now complete the full rental process through the chatbot, a figure the founders cite as evidence that the technology earns adoption rather than mandating it.

A £100 Billion Market with No Clear Leader

The strategy sits on top of a structural vacuum. The UK residential rental market generates over £100 billion in annual rent and around £10 billion in agency commissions, yet no single operator dominates. Roughly 20,000 firms serve 5.5 million rental properties, and the top 100 account for less than 30% of the total.

Regulation is accelerating the consolidation case. The first phase of the Renters’ Rights Act came into force on 1 May 2026, abolishing no-fault evictions and banning rental bidding, with a national landlord register and ombudsman service to follow later in the year. For independent landlords who previously managed their own portfolios, the compliance burden now makes professional agency management more attractive. For small agencies without the resources to automate compliance, it makes selling to a platform like Dwelly a more practical exit.

How Dwelly Raised £69 Million

The £69 million round comprises £32 million in equity led by General Catalyst, the Silicon Valley firm, with participation from Begin Capital and S16VC. A separate £37 million debt facility comes from Trinity Capital, the Nasdaq-listed alternative asset manager, which committed $50 million in growth capital.

General Catalyst did not need educating on the thesis. The firm had already developed an internal conviction around AI-enabled roll-ups: businesses that acquire fragmented, analogue service industries and convert them into software-margin operations. Zeynep Yavuz, a partner at the firm, described the approach as converting “thousands of analogue, agency-level processes into scalable software.”

Growth at Speed, Questions at Scale

The self-reported numbers suggest rapid execution. Ten agencies acquired across Yorkshire, Essex, Suffolk, Brighton and the East Midlands. Over 10,000 properties under management. £200 million in gross merchandise value. Close to 300 employees, roughly 40 in engineering, product and analytics. All in under two years.

To be sure, roll-ups in service industries carry integration risk that compounds with every deal. Staff retention post-acquisition is a known failure point: local agents who built relationships over decades may not stay once ownership changes, regardless of how the brand is preserved. The “best offer wins” lettings model, while marketed as fairer, could increase landlord churn if owners feel they are losing control of tenant selection. And the efficiency claims remain self-reported with no independent benchmarking.

The closest comparable in UK property services is Foxtons, which expanded aggressively through branch openings in the 2010s before Brexit uncertainty and the 2019 Tenant Fees Act drove revenue declines for four consecutive years. Foxtons has since pivoted toward its own acquisition-led lettings consolidation, buying firms like Ludlow Thompson and Cauldwell, which makes it both a cautionary reference and a potential competitor. Dwelly’s model is structurally different, built on AI automation rather than branch density, but the cautionary principle holds: scaling distribution is easier than sustaining service quality across it.

What Comes Next for Dwelly

The stated target is 50,000 properties under management by year-end, enough for a top-five position nationally. Headcount could surpass 1,500 as acquisitions continue. Beyond consolidation, the longer-term vision is a fully transactional rental marketplace with an integrated fintech layer for rent collection. Expansion into Western Europe is on the roadmap, with France as the likely first market.

Reaching 50,000 properties requires completing roughly 40 more acquisitions at the average portfolio size of the deals closed so far. That means Dwelly needs a steady pipeline of willing sellers at valuations that do not erode the unit economics. If competing roll-ups enter the market or agency owners begin pricing in the AI upside themselves, the acquisition cost base could shift quickly. The model works if supply stays loose. Whether it does at this pace is the open question.