Our investment

Dwelly raises $170 million Series B to build the AI operating system for the lettings market.

EQT Growth is co-leading the round alongside existing investor General Catalyst.

We couldn't be more excited to back founders Ilya Drozdov, Dan Lifshits and Dmitry Khanukov as they build what we believe can become the defining end-to-end platform in one of the largest, most fragmented and most underserved service markets in the UK.

Why we're backing applied-AI services roll-ups

One of our highest-conviction themes in EQT Growth over the past year has been what we call applied-AI services roll-ups.

The idea is simple. All across the economy there are big, fragmented, labour-heavy service industries that have barely changed in decades. The usual way to build value here is traditional buy-and-build: acquire lots of small businesses at low multiples and bolt them together into something larger. Most of the value comes from scale and multiple arbitrage.

We think AI changes that picture in a meaningful way. In the right markets, modern AI can automate a big chunk of the manual, repetitive work that runs these businesses. That opens up a different kind of value creation: real, structural margin expansion that comes from genuinely transforming how the business operates, not from financial engineering. People are freed from admin to do the things that actually grow the business, like winning new customers and cross-selling. And because every acquisition adds proprietary longitudinal data from the system of action (long-term records of human services interaction that can be leveraged for AI agentic execution), the automation keeps getting better as the platform grows: a data flywheel and a first-mover edge that compound with scale.

Put simply, as the models improve, automation deepens across mundane admin tasks, thereby freeing up resources to focus on driving growth. The platform gets better the bigger it gets and increased scale drives material margin expansion.

Not every market suits this. The sweet spot combines deep fragmentation, recurring and resilient revenue, workflows that are genuinely automatable, and a customer base with little reason to bring the work in-house. UK property management ticks every one of those boxes, and we think Dwelly is the best-placed team to go after it.

Why Dwelly fits our thesis

A big, resilient and deeply fragmented market

UK residential lettings run on recurring, contracted revenue. Property managers earn a take-rate on rent, and the rent roll sitting underneath the UK private rented sector runs into the tens of billions of pounds a year. With industry gross retention of around 90–95%, that income is unusually sticky and largely shrugs off the economic cycle. It's a material addressable market with clear structural growth tailwinds, as rising regulatory and compliance demands push more landlords toward professional management.

It's also remarkably fragmented. There are more than 10,000 letting agencies in the UK, most of them independent and owner-run, with no scaled player holding meaningful shares. That long tail, plus a steady wave of owner retirements and successions creates a deep, durable pipeline of targets, the bulk of which sit well below the radar of larger consolidators. And the typical customer is a landlord with just a handful of properties – a group that simply can't manage professionally in-house, and is increasingly happy to outsource it.

In other words, it's exactly the kind of resilient, recurring, fragmented market where an applied-AI roll-up can compound for years.

Tech- and AI-first: not multiple arbitrage

What sets Dwelly apart from a typical roll-up is that the engine of value creation is operational, not financial.

The team has built a proprietary platform from the ground up, its own CRM and an end-to-end agentic workflow layer, purpose-built to automate the work of a lettings agency: finding tenants, managing properties, and collecting rent. The difference shows. Jobs that used to take weeks now take days, tenant placement and issue resolution happen far faster, and the earliest, most fully integrated agencies are running at EBITDA margins several times higher than the ~10–15% typical of traditional operators.

When Dwelly buys an agency, it keeps the local brand, the staff and the customer relationships, so nothing changes for landlords, while moving the back office onto its platform and absorbing natural staff turnover through automation rather than blunt cost-cutting. Every deal also feeds Dwelly's proprietary dataset, widening the gap over both legacy incumbents and any would-be new entrant.

This is really the heart of it. Traditional roll-ups buy cheap and lever up. Dwelly buys, transforms, and compounds.

A founder team we have huge conviction in

We've rarely been as impressed by a team's depth of operational understanding.

Ilya, Dan and Dmitry are exactly the profile this thesis calls for, fast-scaling operators from businesses like Uber and Gett, with prior experience building tech-enabled property businesses, and a culture our advisors repeatedly described as "execution machines" with seriously high talent density.

But what really sold us was how they went about it. Before writing a line of code, the team moved to Hull for 18 months to run a property management agency themselves — living the daily reality of letting agents, landlords, tenants and contractors. That immersion became the foundation for the platform they built. Instead of dropping software on an industry from the outside, they encoded the messy, real-world workflows of the business into a system designed to automate them. It's a level of grounding that's very hard to copy, and you can see it in how naturally the product fits the agencies they acquire.

EQT's track record in services buy-and-build

Finally, this is a playbook EQT knows inside out. Industrialising add-on M&A in fragmented service markets is one of our core strengths, built up across some of our most successful platforms, including IVC Evidensia in veterinary care and Anticimex in pest control, among others.

That means we bring a lot more than capital. We bring a tested approach to sourcing, executing and integrating acquisitions at pace; a network of senior industrial advisors with directly relevant operating experience; and the support to help a young, fast-moving company scale its M&A engine without losing the discipline that makes it work. A demonstrated services buy-and-build partner alongside a category-defining AI-native platform is, we think, what makes EQT well-placed to support Dwelly's next chapter.

We believe AI-native companies like Dwelly represent a new chapter for European technology. The combination of exceptional founders, proprietary operational data and AI-native execution creates a different kind of company: one capable of transforming entire industries rather than simply digitising them.

We're excited to partner with Ilya, Dan, Dmitry and the entire Dwelly team as they build what we believe can become a global category leader.