Dwelly secures £69m to accelerate AI-led rental marketplace expansion

UK property technology platform Dwelly has raised £69m ($94m) in combined equity and debt funding to expand its AI-driven roll-up of independent letting agencies across Britain.

The capital raise includes a £32m equity round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Begin Capital and S16VC, alongside a £37m debt facility provided by Trinity Capital. The funding will support further acquisitions as Dwelly seeks to consolidate the UK’s fragmented rental market.

Dwelly operates an AI-enabled roll-up model, acquiring independent agencies and integrating them onto its technology platform. The UK residential rental market generates more than £100bn in annual rent roll and around £10bn in commissions, yet remains highly fragmented, with roughly 20,000 firms operating nationwide. The top 100 account for less than 30 per cent of the country’s 5.5 million rental properties.

Since launching its acquisition strategy in 2024, Dwelly has bought eight agencies and now manages over £200m in gross merchandise value (GMV). The company says it has surpassed 10,000 properties under management, placing it among the UK’s 15 largest letting agencies in under two years.

Co-founder and chief executive Ilya Drozdov said the group’s ambition is to build an end-to-end rental platform that evolves into a fully transactional marketplace, supported by an integrated fintech layer for rent collection and ancillary services.

Dwelly’s platform automates key stages of the rental process, including tenant screening, contract execution, payments, maintenance coordination and pricing adjustments between tenancies.

The company claims its system increases the average number of validated offers per property from one or two under a traditional model to around 10. It says this has reduced average letting times by roughly one-third and introduced a more transparent “best offer wins” model aimed at reducing bias in tenant selection.

Maintenance processes are also being automated. Dwelly uses 24/7 tenant chatbots, automated request triage and AI-driven tracking of maintenance providers. In a sector where maintenance requests can take up to 50 days to resolve, the company says it has already cut resolution times by 33 per cent, with further reductions expected.

General Catalyst partner Zeynep Yavuz described Dwelly’s approach as a “systems-level AI architecture” capable of transforming one of the UK’s most operationally intensive service sectors into a scalable software-led model.

The funding will allow Dwelly to continue acquiring agencies while preserving their branding and local client relationships, offering what it describes as a transparent exit route for agency owners.

By increasing the number of properties under management, Dwelly also gains access to more data to refine its AI models, reinforcing what it argues is a compounding advantage in automation and operational efficiency.

As institutional investors show growing interest in applying AI to traditional service industries, Dwelly’s rapid expansion signals a broader shift in the UK rental market towards consolidation, digital infrastructure and data-led property management.

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Dwelly secures £69m to accelerate AI-led rental marketplace expansion