A London PropTech has secured a £69 million funding deal to fuel the expansion of its AI-powered rental marketplace across the UK.
Dwelly says it leverages AI to significantly enhance the user experience throughout the entire letting cycle, streamlining tenant-landlord matchmaking, maintenance and rent collection.
The firm secured the debt and equity investment to continue its acquisition of lettings agencies. To date it has snapped up eight and currently manages over £200m in GMV.
Around 20,000 firms operate in this space, with the top 100 firms accounting for less than 30% of the approximately 5.5m rental properties across the country. Many of these firms are small or independently owned, often lacking modern systems and tools.
After an acquisition, Dwelly integrates its AI-enabled operating system to automate key functions, reduce manual overhead, and standardize service quality. By increasing the number of agencies and properties under management, Dwelly gains more data to train and improve its AI automations even further.
The capital raise includes a £32m equity round led by global investment and transformation company General Catalyst, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, with the participation of Begin Capital and S16VC, and a £37m debt facility from Trinity Capital.
“We have crossed 10,000 properties under management, placing Dwelly among the UK’s top 15 largest letting agencies in less than two years – an unseen speed of growth for letting agencies,” said Ilya Drozdov, co-founder and CEO of Dwelly.
“Our vision is to build an end-to-end platform evolving into a fully transactional rental marketplace with a robust FinTech layer for rent collection and ancillary products.”