Dwelly raises £128M to buy up UK letting agencies and run them on AI

Dwelly, a London company that buys UK letting agencies and runs them using AI, has raised $170M, or about £128M, in a Series B round co-led by EQT Growth and General Catalyst. The round splits into $95M of equity and a $75M debt facility led by Trinity Capital, and it takes Dwelly past $260M raised in under a year, having closed a $93M Series A only in February. Returning backers s16vc, Begin Capital, and DVC took part, alongside KKR’s Philipp Freise and personal cheques from the founders of several European AI companies, including Synthesia and ElevenLabs.

The model is the interesting part. Rather than sell software to letting agents, Dwelly buys the agencies outright and rebuilds them around its own AI, a strategy investors have taken to calling an “AI rollup”. The pitch is that automating the repetitive core of lettings, tenant screening, rent collection, maintenance requests, and compliance, lets far fewer people manage far more properties. Dwelly says one property manager can now handle 300 units, up from about 100, and that it manages around 15,000 properties, which it says puts it among the UK’s ten largest letting agencies.

For UK AI, it is a notable widening of where the money is going. Most large UK AI rounds this year have funded model-builders, chips, or scientific research, but Dwelly is a bet that the bigger near-term value is in taking an unglamorous, fragmented, heavily manual industry and running it on software. That letting agencies are the target is almost incidental: the same buy-and-automate playbook could be pointed at any number of local service businesses, which is likely what drew growth investors like EQT and General Catalyst.

The approach leans heavily on what the industry now calls an AI agent, software that does not just answer a question but carries out multi-step tasks such as chasing a rent payment or triaging a repair. The open question, as with every agent deployment, is how much genuinely runs unattended versus how much still needs a human in the loop, and whether service quality holds up as Dwelly acquires and converts more agencies. The company says the new money will fund more acquisitions, better automation for compliance and maintenance, financial products for landlords and tenants, and expansion into some European markets.