Xylo raises £2.8M pre-seed to take the admin load off planning officers
July 1, 2026
Xylo, a UK govtech startup building AI agents for local-authority planning teams, has raised £2.8M in a pre-seed round led by CapitalT.
England's planning system is a chronic bottleneck. Council planning departments are short-staffed and swamped with casework, and applications frequently take months to clear review — a drag on housing supply that successive governments have promised to fix. Xylo's bet is that much of the delay is administrative rather than a matter of judgement, and that the paperwork is what can be automated.
The company builds AI agents that do the grunt work around an application: pulling together case files, researching the relevant local planning policy, and drafting a first-pass officer report. The decision stays with the planning officer, who reviews and signs off. The founders spent more than 300 hours shadowing officers inside councils before building the product, and say the design reflects where officers actually lose time rather than where software is easiest to bolt on.
Leeds City Council came on as an early design partner. In trials, Xylo says officers processed roughly 40% more applications each month, and 83% reported that the tool helped them work more accurately. Co-founder Habs Kim, who leads the company alongside Dermot O'Riordan, has framed the opportunity as extending beyond the UK to permitting processes in the United States, where similar backlogs exist.
The round was led by CapitalT, with participation from Common Magic, Sure Valley Ventures, Tiny VC and Endurance Ventures, plus angel investors from DeepMind, Gensyn and Dawn Capital. Xylo plans to use the capital to expand its engineering team and sign further councils as it moves from design partnerships to paid deployments.
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