Coadjute: How One Startup Is Digitising the UK Property Market

Coadjute Ltd., a London-based property technology company, has raised £23 million and signed up software platforms used by the majority of UK estate agents as it builds a real-time data network designed to connect the banks, agents, conveyancers and brokers involved in residential property transactions. The company counts Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest Group and Rightmove among its backers.

The network, which went live in 2021, does not replace the software that property professionals already use. Instead, it sits behind existing platforms, allowing different parties in a transaction to share updates, documents and verified identities automatically. The technology is built on R3’s Corda, an enterprise-grade distributed ledger used in institutional finance, and encrypts each data exchange so that only the relevant counterparties can see it.

“At heart the challenge is that the many systems involved are not interoperable,” Dan Salmons, the company’s chief executive, said. “Adding yet more platforms, more hubs, more databases just doesn’t solve that.”

Salmons, a former NatWest executive who helped lead the UK rollout of contactless bank cards, co-founded the company in 2018 with John Reynolds, a veteran of Dell, Fujitsu, Lockheed Martin and the Ministry of Justice who has led projects for both HM Land Registry and the Bank of England. Reynolds is the author of “Digital Bricks and Mortar,” a book on the future of the UK property sector.

The business grew out of HM Land Registry’s Digital Street initiative, a 2018 project that invited the property industry to prototype a digitally connected market. Salmons and Reynolds won the brief, spent two years piloting the concept, and completed their first live transaction in July 2021, a property in Kent that went from sale agreed to completion in nine weeks. The UK average is roughly five months, according to industry data, with about 30% of deals collapsing before exchange of contracts.

Adoption has built steadily since then. Software providers including Reapit, MRI Software, Dezrez, Osprey Approach, Redbrick and VTUK have connected to the network. The Property Franchise Group, the country’s largest franchise group of estate agents, announced a national rollout after a five-month pilot. Coadjute says that nearly 70% of UK estate agents now use a software platform that is or will be connected to the network, though the company has not disclosed transaction volumes.

The funding has scaled accordingly. A £1 million pre-seed round in 2019 was followed by £3 million in seed funding in 2020 and a £6 million raise led by Manchester-based Praetura Ventures in late 2021. Praetura invested a further £4 million in 2023.

The defining round came in April 2024. Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, NatWest and Rightmove invested £10 million, with Lloyds leading at £3 million. It was the first time the UK’s three largest mortgage providers had co-funded a single proptech company. The investment brought total capital raised to roughly £23 million, according to the company.

The strategic rationale for the lenders centres on a basic inefficiency. Mortgage providers typically sit at the end of a long information chain, waiting on documents from agents and conveyancers before releasing funds. A shared data layer that surfaces transaction status in real time could shorten that chain considerably.

“We see huge potential to digitise and improve the experience of moving home for consumers,” Johan Svanstrom, Rightmove’s chief executive, said at the time of the investment.

Coadjute has also participated in Project Meridian, a collaboration with the Bank of England, HM Land Registry and the Bank for International Settlements that built a digital settlement prototype demonstrating how funds and property titles could be exchanged more efficiently. The project received international recognition and underlined the breadth of what the company’s technology can support beyond standard residential transactions.

In early 2025, the company made a significant strategic shift, moving into fully managed anti-money laundering compliance. The UK government’s National Risk Assessment identifies property as a high-risk sector, with an estimated £10 billion laundered through real estate each year. HMRC has intensified enforcement, and estate agents and conveyancers face growing pressure to show they maintain robust compliance frameworks, not just basic screening checks.

Coadjute’s Assured Compliance service combines its technology platform with a UK-based team of compliance professionals. The offering covers identity verification, source-of-funds and source-of-wealth analysis, enhanced due diligence and ongoing monitoring within what the company describes as a structured governance framework aligned with ISO 31000 risk management principles. It has supported firms through successful HMRC audits.

As part of the compliance push, the company recruited Phil Spencer, the presenter of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location, as an official ambassador. Spencer has been a prominent voice in UK property for more than 20 years.

“Strengthening compliance isn’t about red tape, it’s about protecting consumers and the integrity of the market,” Spencer said.

The product roadmap extends further. In April 2025, Coadjute announced what it called the UK’s first Property Super App, a consumer-facing application that guides buyers and sellers through every stage of a home move from a single interface. The app tracks progress across all parties, surfaces prompts when action is needed and removes the need for repeated data entry. The company has said it plans to expand the app to cover mortgages, insurance and home maintenance.

The company was ranked 42nd on the 2026 Sifted UK and Ireland Top 100 Startups leaderboard and has been featured in The Financial Times and The Times.

Challenges remain. The UK property industry has a record of resisting digital change, and Coadjute faces the inherent difficulty of any network business: its value depends on adoption, but persuading each new participant requires demonstrating value that only materialises at scale. The housing market is also exposed to shifts in interest rates, regulation and political direction.

Still, the company has assembled a combination of institutional backing, regulatory relevance and existing industry integration that distinguishes it from earlier attempts to digitise the sector. Previous efforts typically asked the market to adopt new tools. Coadjute has taken the opposite approach, plugging into the systems the market already runs on and building the connective layer in between.