Openmoove Secures £700,000 to Accelerate PropTech Expansion

Openmoove, a Cardiff-based property technology startup, has raised £700,000 in pre-seed equity funding to scale its platform across the United Kingdom’s residential property sector. The round was led by the Development Bank of Wales, which contributed £350,000 through its Wales Technology Fund, alongside £335,000 from early-stage venture firm HAATCH and a group of Welsh angel investors. The deal marks the second co-investment between HAATCH and the Development Bank, underscoring sustained institutional appetite for Welsh proptech ventures at the earliest stages of growth.

The raise lands in a market defined by chronic inefficiency. Nearly 30% of UK residential property transactions collapsed before completion in 2024, almost double the 16% failure rate recorded just two years earlier. The average time to complete a sale now stands at roughly five months, a figure that has climbed by 38% over the past decade. Industry analysts estimate the cumulative cost of failed transactions at approximately £8.6 billion annually, a burden shared unevenly among estate agents, conveyancers, mortgage brokers and the buyers and sellers caught in the middle. More than 250,000 property transactions fell through across 2025 alone, according to Propertymark data, with the average price of a collapsed sale sitting at £365,949. It is precisely this structural dysfunction that Openmoove was built to address.

Founded in 2024 by Ross McKenzie and Cai Gwinnutt, the proptech startup has spent the past 18 months developing and testing a platform designed to streamline communication and workflow management between the multiple professionals involved in every residential property transaction. Rather than asking estate agents, conveyancers and mortgage brokers to abandon the software systems they already rely on, Openmoove integrates with those existing tools to create a shared data layer and a unified communication channel. The aim is to reduce the administrative friction and information gaps that cause delays, miscommunication and, ultimately, deal collapse.

McKenzie, who serves as chief executive, brings deep operational experience from within the property industry. He previously held senior positions at Purplebricks, the hybrid online estate agency that reshaped the UK’s residential sales market, and at Countrywide, once the nation’s largest estate agency group. He later founded Isla-Alexander, a Cardiff-based brokerage that he sold to The Agency UK, known as TAUK, in 2025. That transaction saw TAUK, which counts Purplebricks co-founder Kenny Bruce and former Countrywide chairman and chief executive Harry Hill among its leadership, absorb the Welsh firm as part of an aggressive consolidation strategy across the self-employed estate agency sector. McKenzie’s decision to pivot from running an agency to building technology for the sector reflects a conviction, informed by years of first-hand frustration, that the infrastructure underpinning property transactions remains fundamentally broken.

Gwinnutt, who serves as Openmoove’s Chief Technology Officer, brings approximately two decades of experience across engineering and startup environments. His previous roles include positions at OnExamination, Amplyfi, Cyber Innovation Hub and Tramshed Tech, the Cardiff-based innovation community that has become a notable launchpad for Welsh technology companies. Together, the two founders represent a combination of proptech domain expertise and technical capability that investors found compelling.

“Our focus has been on creating technology that fits around the systems professionals already use, rather than forcing them to change behaviour or adopt a completely new way of working,” said Gwinnutt.

Mike Rees, Investment Executive at the Development Bank of Wales, said the founding team had combined sector knowledge with strong technical execution to build a platform targeting a large and structurally important market. He noted that the Openmoove investment would help the company scale from Cardiff, create new jobs and build on commercial foundations already in place. The Development Bank of Wales has funded more than 300 innovative technology ventures with over £97 million since 2017, unlocking a further £210 million in co-investment from the private sector. Its £20 million Wales Technology Seed Fund II provides equity investments of between £100,000 and £350,000 to Welsh proptech and technology businesses at proof-of-concept stage.

The fresh capital is expected to fund the creation of six new roles in Cardiff over the coming months as Openmoove assembles a small, specialist team to support commercial rollout. The company has indicated it will direct investment toward product development, go-to-market activity and deepening integration with the internal systems used by property professionals across the UK. Early commercial traction, including interest from estate agency groups, suggests that the platform’s approach of sitting alongside existing software rather than replacing it has resonated with potential customers who have historically resisted wholesale technology overhauls.

The raise arrives at a moment of sustained investor interest in British property technology. The UK proptech market was valued at approximately $3.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of between 15 and 20% through the end of the decade, according to multiple industry research estimates. Globally, the proptech sector attracted roughly $16.7 billion in venture and private credit investment in 2025, with capital increasingly flowing toward companies that embed within existing operational workflows rather than attempting to replace them entirely. The UK, home to major portals such as Rightmove and Zoopla alongside a growing ecosystem of transaction-focused startups like Coadjute and GOTO, remains one of Europe’s most active markets for property technology investment.

For Openmoove, the task now turns to commercial execution. The company must demonstrate that its proptech platform can reduce transaction times and fall-through rates at scale, a proposition that, if proven, would carry significant implications for an industry that processes more than one million residential sales annually. With institutional backing secured, a founding team that has both built and operated within the property sector, and a clear product roadmap centred on deeper integrations and broader market coverage, the Cardiff startup enters its next phase with the credibility and the capital to compete. In a sector where nearly one in three deals still fails to cross the finish line, the commercial case for better coordination between agents, conveyancers and brokers has rarely been stronger.