The London startup is buying independent lettings firms and folding them onto an AI platform, with EQT Growth leading the equity and Trinity Capital supplying the debt.
The UK lettings business still runs on phone calls, paperwork, and the slow choreography of getting a boiler fixed, and Dwelly is betting that most of it can be handed to software.
The London-based startup had raised $170mn in a Series B round, split between $95mn of equity and a $75mn debt facility, and it plans to spend the money buying independent lettings agencies and moving them onto an AI platform that runs the day-to-day.
EQT Growth led the equity, and General Catalyst, s16vc, Begin Capital, and DVC all joined, alongside a roster of angels that reads like a who’s who of European AI.
The chief executives of Legora, Synthesia, and ElevenLabs each put in money, as did Philipp Freise, a partner and co-head of European private equity at KKR. Trinity Capital supplied the $75mn in debt. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Dwelly describes itself as an AI-native operating system for lettings and property management, and the model is a roll-up with a twist.
Rather than simply aggregating agencies for scale, it acquires independent firms and migrates them onto its own software, which handles tenant and landlord communication, maintenance coordination, rent collection, and compliance.
Consolidation is the mood across proptech right now, from robotic listing cameras to the $800mn deal for Zonda that closed out CoStar’s data empire, though few rivals have tried to buy the agencies outright.
The pitch, according to the company, is productivity. Dwelly says it now manages more than 15,000 properties and a £350mn rent roll, which it reckons makes it a top-10 UK agency, and it says its agents each handle upwards of 300 units, roughly triple the 100 or so a traditional manager might juggle.
Those figures come from Dwelly’s own reporting rather than an independent audit, so they are worth reading as ambition as much as record, but the direction is clear enough.
The company was founded by Ilya Drozdov, Dan Lifshits, and Dmitry Khanukov, who between them logged 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, the chief executive. That assumption, rather than any single feature, is really what the round is 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,”* the kind of 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, rather than any single headline acquisition, is what the software has to prove, and it is the part of the model that the incumbents have found hardest to automate.
The fresh capital will go three ways, per the company: 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 matters here too, 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 $93mn Series A in February, and the two rounds together have pulled in more than $260mn in under a year.
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