Street Group Hits £200m Valuation as Hg Backs Its AI-Agent Play for UK Agents

The Number That Matters

The headline figure is £200m, but the more instructive detail is where Hg is putting its money. The London-based software investor, known for backing scale SaaS businesses rather than early-stage bets, committed approximately £7m through its Hg Mercury Fund, with additional institutional co-investors alongside. That is a precision stake, not a seed cheque. It says something about what Hg thinks the trajectory looks like.

Street Group secured a strategic growth investment from Hg on 22 July 2026, valuing the company at more than £200m, with the stated purpose of accelerating its AI-led product vision for UK estate and letting agents. Street Group, formerly Agent Software, is a Manchester-based provider of vertical software and AI for the UK residential property sector. Founded in 2015 by siblings Tom and Heather Staff, the company now serves more than 4,000 estate agency offices across the UK.

What Street Actually Sells

Street has built an integrated operating system for estate and letting agents, spanning its core CRM (Street.co.uk), its prospecting and lead-generation platform Spectre, and a growing suite of AI-native products including Cortex, which allows customers to build and orchestrate their own AI agents.

Cortex is the product worth watching closely. It is designed to automate a range of estate agency workflows by enabling users to build and deploy AI agents within their existing systems, sitting on top of Street's CRM and marketing tools and covering enquiry handling, client communication, marketing activity, sales progression and property management. The distinction Street is pushing, and which Hg presumably stress-tested, is integration depth. Unlike traditional add-on tools, Cortex is positioned as an integrated system that executes tasks within an agency's core software environment, rather than simply supporting users with recommendations or prompts.

Cortex was developed over six months and is designed to help estate agents, letting agents and property managers build and run AI agents that can handle tasks across agency workflows, including enquiry handling, client communications, marketing, sales progression and property management within existing systems. By May, Cortex had been positioned as an AI layer built on top of Street's existing CRM and marketing system, configured and deployed by estate agents, letting agents and property managers across day-to-day workflows. Over 300 agencies had begun onboarding at that point.

Why Now, Why This Sector

The timing is not accidental. AI adoption among UK letting agents is moving fast. AI leasing assistants represent the fastest-growing category in UK proptech, with adoption among letting agents increasing from 8% in 2024 to an estimated 23% by early 2026. The pressure driving that shift is structural: the Renters' Rights Act 2025 has increased compliance complexity, while chronic staffing shortages in the lettings sector (ARLA Propertymark reports a 34% vacancy rate for negotiator roles) and tenant expectations for instant digital communication are forcing the issue.

The Alto 2026 Agency Trends Report found that over half of UK estate agents plan to adopt AI tools for listings, lead generation and marketing this year, while two-thirds expect to use compliance automation to manage increasing regulatory demands. The addressable market is real, and the pull is coming from operations, not brochure-ware curiosity.

There is a broader pattern here too. UK proptech funding reached a peak of £507.5m in 2021, and while investment has moderated since, 2025 still saw £230.4m raised by UK proptech companies, up from £192.4m the year before. Capital is returning, but selectively: this cycle rewards vertical depth and workflow integration over point solutions.

The Brand Deficit Hidden in the Data

The Street deal is conspicuous precisely because branded, institutionally-backed PropTech remains scarce relative to the sheer volume of companies in the space. AIBD analysis of Companies House and IPO data, as of July 2026, shows that 3,164 new SIC 68.20 (residential lettings) companies were incorporated in Q3 2026 alone, down 78.8% on the prior period. That sharp contraction in new formation points to a shakeout rather than a build-up. On the trademark side, Class 37 UK filings reached just 459 in Q3 2026, a 73.8% decline on the prior period. Most striking: 99.6% of active SIC 68.20 companies hold no Class 37 trademark at all. That is not just a brand hygiene issue. It signals that the overwhelming majority of UK letting businesses are operating without any registered IP protection for their core service offering, a structural vulnerability that becomes acute when a well-capitalised AI platform starts buying market share.

Street Group's institutional raise is the other side of that ledger. The 0.4% of SIC 68.20 operators that do invest in brand and product infrastructure are increasingly pulling away.

What the RICS Is Watching

Valuation is the next frontier. RICS global practice guidance on AI in real estate valuation was issued for public consultation in Q2 2026 and is expected to be published later in 2026, aimed at supporting RICS Registered Valuers and regulated firms in the responsible use of AI within property valuation practices. AI property valuation tools can produce an instant price estimate for a typical UK home in under three seconds, and roughly 80% of those estimates land within 10% of a chartered surveyor's figure. Seventeen of the top 20 UK mortgage lenders already use Hometrack's AVM, processing around 50 million valuations a year and covering close to 75% of the mortgage market.

Street's Cortex does not yet sit at the valuation layer, but the Spectre integration already pulls automated valuations into the CRM. The direction of travel is clear.

The Honest Caveat

Cortex's dependency is also its constraint. Cortex will only work with the Street CRM system, so agents need to have that in place. Lock-in is a feature for Hg's underwrite; it is a sales objection for every agency currently on Reapit, Alto or Dezrez. Street will need to convert CRM relationships, not just sell Cortex as a bolt-on, and that is a longer, harder motion than the fundraise announcement implies.

The £200m valuation is a concrete data point in a sector that has spent two years generating more heat than signal. Street has software in production, paying customers, and institutional discipline behind the product roadmap. That combination is rarer than the press releases suggest.