Xylo has raised £2.8 million in a pre-seed round led by CapitalT, with participation from Common Magic, Sure Valley Ventures, Tiny VC and Endurance Ventures, along with angels from DeepMind, Gensyn and Dawn Capital, Mark Ransford, and exited govtech founders. Xylo helps local authorities process planning applications faster and with greater accuracy, using AI agents to handle the administrative work while officers retain the judgement.
Planning departments are under pressure that officer headcount alone cannot resolve. The challenge is not expertise, since planning officers carry deep knowledge of local policy and planning law, but the administrative volume surrounding every decision, including chasing documents, checking submissions and collating responses. Xylo's AI agents handle that layer directly, built over more than 300 hours working alongside practising officers. Early results show councils processing 40% more applications per officer each month, with 83% of officers reporting that the platform helps them work more accurately. The judgement stays with the officer throughout.
Beyond throughput, cleared backlogs carry downstream consequences, including more homes approved, more infrastructure consented and more clean energy projects progressed. Xylo's vision is a public sector that delivers same-day decisions as standard, with the best service in a citizen's day coming from government itself.
Founded by Habs Kim and Dermot O'Riordan, Xylo combines engineering depth from Cytora and Marshmallow with legal and operational experience from Hogan Lovells and Orrick, a pairing that shapes the product's ground-up approach to understanding how planning workflows actually function.
Local government has long been underserved by technology, not for lack of need, but because genuinely understanding these workflows takes sustained effort that most founders bypass, said Barry Downes, Managing Partner at SVV (Sure Valley Ventures). What stood out about Habs and Dermot is that they did the work: hundreds of hours alongside planning officers before a line of code was written, and a rare combination of technical rigour and institutional understanding that shows in the early results. This is exactly the type of opportunity SVV looks for, founders solving a hard problem.
Local government has long been underserved by technology - not for lack of need, but because genuinely understanding these workflows takes sustained effort that most founders bypass. What stood out about Habs and Dermot is that they did the work: hundreds of hours alongside planning officers before a line of code was written, and a rare combination of technical rigour and institutional understanding that shows in the early results. This is exactly the type of opportunity we look for at SVV - founders solving a hard problem.
