Dwelly raises $170M to digitize UK lettings agencies

EQT Growth has led a $170 million Series B round for a London startup that is buying up independent lettings agencies and migrating them onto an AI-driven platform. Trinity Capital provided the debt portion, which amounts to $75 million, while the remaining $95 million came from equity investors.

The UK lettings market remains stubbornly analog, with most agencies still relying on phone calls, piles of paperwork, and the slow process of arranging a boiler repair. Dwelly is betting that nearly all of these tasks can be automated. The company plans to use the fresh capital to acquire more independent firms and fold them onto its proprietary software, which handles everything from tenant and landlord communication to maintenance coordination, rent collection, and compliance.

The equity round included participation from General Catalyst, s16vc, Begin Capital, and DVC. A notable roster of angel investors also backed the deal, including the CEOs of Legora, Synthesia, and ElevenLabs, as well as Philipp Freise, a partner and co-head of European private equity at KKR. The company did not disclose its valuation.

Dwelly describes its platform as an AI-native operating system for lettings and property management. Its model is a roll-up with a twist: rather than simply aggregating agencies for scale, it acquires them and moves them onto its own software. The result, the company claims, is a significant productivity boost. Dwelly says it now manages more than 15,000 properties and a £350 million rent roll, which it believes places it among the top 10 UK agencies. It also reports that its agents each handle upwards of 300 units, roughly triple the 100 or so a traditional manager might oversee. These figures come from Dwelly’s own reporting rather than an independent audit, so they should be read as ambition as much as record, but the direction is clear.

The company was founded by Ilya Drozdov, Dan Lifshits, and Dmitry Khanukov, who between them spent years at Uber, Gett, and McKinsey before turning to Britain’s rental market. “Dwelly is AI-first by default: we assume AI should be able to do every operational task,” Drozdov said. That assumption, rather than any single feature, is what the round is ultimately funding.

For tenants, the promise is mostly speed. Zeynep Yavuz-Willson of General Catalyst described what Dwelly is selling as “a question answered in seconds,” a pitch that carries weight in a market where a slow reply to a repair request can mean days without heating or hot water. Getting that response time down is the part of the model that incumbents have found hardest to automate.

The fresh capital will go three ways: more work on the AI platform, more acquisitions, and a wider set of products for landlords and tenants, including legal protection, rent guarantees, financing options, and a marketplace for contractors. The debt line is important here because it gives Dwelly firepower to keep buying agencies without diluting its equity every time it does. It is the same instinct that has pushed agentic software into the duller corners of real estate, where the work is repetitive and the margins have long been thin.

It has been a fast year. The Series B lands barely five months after a $93 million Series A in February, and the two rounds together have pulled in more than $260 million in under a year.