The UK rental market runs on paperwork, phone calls, and slow processes. A London based AI real estate startup Dwelly, is changing that fast. The company just raised £69 million ($93 million) in fresh funding and has already crossed 10,000 properties under management in under two years. That kind of growth puts Dwelly among the top 15 largest letting agencies in the UK right now.
The funding round breaks down into £32 million in equity led by General Catalyst, with participation from Begin Capital and S16VC, plus a £37 million debt facility from Trinity Capital. That mix of equity and debt tells you something about how Dwelly actually works: it buys traditional letting agencies, not just software.
The Market It Is Targeting:
The UK lettings market is big and fragmented. Around 20,000 lettings firms collectively manage 5.5 million rental properties. Those properties generate more than £100 billion in annual rent and about £10 billion in agency commissions. Despite those numbers, the top 100 firms control less than 30% of the market. Most agencies still run on manual processes with no real tech infrastructure underneath.
That fragmentation is exactly what Dwelly is targeting.
How the AI Rollup Works:
Dwelly buys independent letting agencies, keeps the local brand and staff in place, then layers its own AI operating system across the business. The AI handles tenant communications, background checks, and offer management. Instead of the one or two offers a typical agency generates on a listed property, Dwelly’s system produces an average of 10 validated offers within three days.
On the maintenance side, the company has brought resolution times down from the industry average of around 50 days to 20 days. Chatbots triage tenant requests around the clock and track follow-ups with maintenance providers so nothing gets missed.
The founders are clear that this is not about replacing staff. In a typical branch of 10 to 15 people, only one person is usually out doing physical work like viewings. The rest spend their time on emails, phone calls, and coordination. That is the admin work the AI takes on.
Why Buying Beats Selling Software:
The co-founders considered selling AI software to agencies before deciding to buy them instead. Co-founder and CPO Dan Lifshits, a former GM and global VP at ride-hailing company Gett, explained the economics directly. Selling software to an agency nets you roughly 1.5 to 2% of that agency’s P&L. Owning the agency means you get 100% of it.
There is also a structural reason the rollup model makes sense here. UK tenancies typically last about three years, which makes it hard to win landlords away from their existing agents through organic outreach. Acquiring an agency means acquiring its landlord relationships directly.
The Team Behind It:
CEO Ilya Drozdov previously served as a general manager at Uber and co-founded a tech-enabled rental agency in Russia that scaled to 10,000 apartments. Co-founder and CPO Dan Lifshits was a global VP at Gett. CTO Dmitry Khanukov rounds out the founding team.
The company currently employs close to 300 people. About 40 of them work at headquarters in engineering, product, and analytics.
Growth Targets for 2026:
Dwelly currently manages more than £200 million in gross rent. The company is targeting 50,000 properties under management by the end of 2026, which would place it in the UK’s top five letting agencies. Headcount is expected to surpass 1,500 by year end as acquisitions continue.
Zeynep Yavuz, a partner at General Catalyst, described Dwelly as converting agency-level processes into scalable software that improves tenant experience, landlord economics, and agency efficiency at the same time.
What Comes After the UK:
Dwelly is focused on the UK for now. The founders have said France is a likely first step into Western Europe, followed by broader European expansion and eventually the US.
The AI enabled real estate rollup model is gaining real traction across industries, and Dwelly is one of the clearer examples of how it works in practice: acquire fragmented, process-heavy businesses, integrate AI to improve operations, and capture the full economics of the customer relationship instead of a small software licensing fee.
If you’re tracking AI applications in traditional industries or following the UK PropTech space, Dwelly’s approach to building a tech-powered letting agency network from the ground up is worth understanding in detail.
