Dwelly raises $170M Series B to build the AI operating system for UK lettings

Dwelly has raised a $170 million Series B to build the AI operating system for UK lettings agencies. The financing was led by EQT Growth, with participation from General Catalyst, s16vc, Begin Capital, DVC, and great founders including the CEOs of Legora, Synthesia, and ElevenLabs, plus Philipp Freise, Partner and Co-Head of European Private Equity at KKR.

The round includes $95 million in equity and a $75 million debt facility led by Trinity Capital. We will use the capital to boost AI-native platform development, acquire more independent agencies, and bring them onto Dwelly's operating system.

Services are the largest part of the global economy. The WTO estimates that services account for 67% of global GDP and 50% of global employment. But many service businesses still run through phone calls, inboxes, PDFs, spreadsheets, and fragmented vertical software.

Software helped organize that work but it didn’t perform it. For a decade, "services" was a dirty word in venture investing. People believed it has low margins, no leverage, and doesn't scale. 

AI changes this. It can read documents, update systems, follow up with customers, check policy, escalate exceptions, and complete workflows across multiple tools. That makes a new kind of company possible: an AI-native service provider that does the work, rather than only selling software to the people doing it.

An AI-native services business does two things at once that SaaS could only dream of:

→ Expands EBITDA — agents replace cost, they don't just augment it

→ Accelerates growth — you're not selling seats, you're absorbing the work

AI makes Services the new SaaS.

Each iconic technology company emerges with the introduction of groundbreaking technology. The emergence of the internet enabled digital network platforms like Facebook. Next one was a SaaS wave that brought software to be sold into the services businesses. One of the next waves enabled technology to tap deeper into the services economy, with companies like Uber, which did not sell dispatch software to taxi companies. Instead, Uber rebuilt the service layer by managing demand and supply itself, while providing routing, payments, and most importantly, trust.

Now, with agentic AI, technology can go even deeper into industries that have remained undisturbed – labor-intensive, service-displacing industries. The best starting points are markets where the work is frequent, fragmented, document-heavy, and still deeply human when something goes wrong. Property management is a great example. 

The UK private rented sector accounts for 19% of UK households, and even more in Europe (32%) and the US (35%). In the UK, for agency owners and landlords, it has become more demanding: higher compliance requirements under the Renters' Rights Act, more tenant communication, tighter landlord economics, and pressure to move faster without lowering service quality.

The UK lettings market has roughly 20,000 firms managing around 5.5 million rental properties. These firms handle more than £100 billion in annual rent and about £10 billion in agency commissions. The market is large, fragmented, and hyper-local. It’s also very operational: somebody has to deal with it when a home needs maintenance, when rent is late, when a tenant has a question, or when a landlord needs a clear update. The quality of the service IS the product.

Today, Dwelly has over 15,000 properties, making us a top-10 agency in the UK. We manage £350 million in rent roll. In February 2026, we raised $93 million to fuel our AI-powered expansion across the UK's letting industry. Since then, we have expanded the agency network and continued to build the AI platform those agencies run on.

Property owners need two things from an agency. The first is transactional: photos, viewings, calls, payments, leak repairs, contract questions, contractor coordination, and routine updates. The second is peace of mind: knowing the property is cared for, risks are spotted early, and the right decisions are being made.

Dwelly is automating the transactional layer. Every tenant and landlord communication runs through our platform, which keeps a continuously updated context for each customer and property. AI agents handle work end to end, from answering maintenance, contract, tenancy procedure, and routine questions to selecting the right maintenance provider, requesting parts, coordinating appointments, and keeping every party updated.

The relationship layer stays with people. AI can help prepare the work and make sure nothing is missed but it cannot replace the trust that comes from inspecting a property, understanding its value as an investment, or helping a landlord make a judgment call. That is where our staff agents can spend more of their time.

Agency staff supervise the AI agents and act as advisors to landlords and tenants. This allows each agent to handle more than 300 units, up from around 100, while Dwelly continues to improve service quality across the network. The goal is to turn property management into a wealth-management-grade experience for landlords and tenants, far beyond what traditional agencies can usually provide. Ride-hailing changed how people thought about taxi work by putting the service inside a modern operating system. We believe AI will do something similar for lettings. 

We have an immense advantage in data. When Dwelly acquires an agency, we inherit years of communication history, landlord preferences, contractor behavior, property records, process exceptions, and local operating context. In many cases, that means five or more years of emails and workflow history: the landlord who prefers to be called Ben rather than Benjamin, the contractor who is fastest for urgent plumbing jobs, the owner who wants a call before repairs above a certain threshold. That history helps the AI system understand how work is done and where a person should step in. Once a workflow is automated or improved in one agency, Dwelly can roll it out across the network.

This is impossible to build as a software vendor from the outside. Adoption is hard when a vendor asks agency staff to change how they work. It is faster when we, the operating company, own the workflow, train the system on real cases, and measure outcomes every day.

That is why AI services can become larger than SaaS. SaaS sells into software budgets. AI services can address the labor, outsourcing, and professional-services budgets behind the software. Sequoia has framed the same shift around a simple budget fact: for every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services.

Traditional multiples for SaaS companies are based on their profit margins and growth rates. AI-native services enable faster growth and bigger margins, which makes them much closer to SaaS companies. 

The problem is, you couldn’t scale anything but SaaS before AI came in. 

The Series B gives us more capacity to improve our AI and integrate more agencies. We will invest in three areas:

• First, AI development. We will deepen automation across lettings, property management, rent collection, compliance, and maintenance, with clear handoffs between AI agents and staff.

• Second, expansion. We will continue buying high-quality independent agencies across the UK and then beyond, and integrating them into Dwelly's AI operating system.

• Third, we intend to invest meaningfully in the experience we provide to landlords and clients. Our AI-native model allows us to move away from routine administrative work and dedicate significantly more time to our clients and landlords, addressing their concerns and improving their experience wherever we can. We intend to build out a full suite of products, ranging from legal protection and rent guarantees to a variety of financing options and a contractor marketplace, so that working with Dwelly feels distinctly different from working with any other player in the market.

Renting is one of the most important consumer services in the economy, the largest cost item in any household. It should be faster, clearer, and more reliable for everyone involved, including landlords, tenants and contractors. 

That is the future we are building.