Founded in Cardiff in 2024 by Ross McKenzie and Cai Gwinnutt, openmoove is a property technology business on a mission to make buying and selling a home less stressful. The company has developed a B2B platform connecting estate agents, conveyancers and mortgage brokers in a single shared workspace to tackle the miscommunication that causes one in three UK sales to collapse. After 18 months of product development, openmoove secured £700,000 in equity investment led by the Development Bank of Wales, with co-investment from venture firm HAATCH and Welsh angel investors. Co-Founder and CEO Ross McKenzie shares how the Business Wales’ Accelerated Growth Programme (AGP) helped shape openmoove’s journey.
What inspired you to start openmoove?
Having spent 13 years in estate agency, including a senior role at Purplebricks during its growth to a £1.3 billion market cap, I kept seeing the same problem: agents, conveyancers and mortgage brokers working in isolation, with home movers left chasing updates. The UK home-moving process averages 25 weeks from listing to completion, and most of the delay is caused by poor communication. openmoove was born from asking: what if every professional and every home mover could see the same information, at the same time, from day one?
What challenges did you face early on?
Trust was the biggest hurdle. Property professionals don’t easily adopt new tools that touch live transactions. We had to prove the product in the real world, running early transactions manually and sitting alongside agents and conveyancers to understand the friction. We went deep with a small number of early partners rather than going wide too quickly, and those relationships gave us credibility with larger enterprise groups. Raising investment as a pre-revenue business in a cautious market was another challenge that demanded a sharp commercial narrative.
How has AGP supported you?
AGP provided structure and credibility at a stage when both were genuinely valuable. Having an external sounding board helped us challenge our assumptions and prioritise the right things and our Relationship Manager, Nicola, has been fantastic. The support around commercial strategy and go-to-market planning was most impactful. We had a strong product vision but needed to sharpen how we turned it into repeatable sales processes and partnership frameworks. The conversations around scaling from founder-led sales to a structured growth engine have been particularly relevant as we prepare our first post-funding hires.
What milestones are you most proud of?
Launching a working product within six months of founding, on very limited capital, was a statement of intent. Securing national partnership agreements before our CRM integrations were live showed that the market believed in what we were building. And closing £700,000 in seed funding, with the Development Bank of Wales and HAATCH backing us, validated the model commercially. But the proudest moment was a home mover telling us that, for the first time in their life, buying a property hadn’t felt stressful. That’s what we built this for: to transform the home-moving experience.
What’s next for openmoove?
The investment allows us to scale up and build our team in Cardiff. In the coming months, we’ll create six new roles across partnerships, customer success and engineering. We’re also leading the Move Wales initiative, a cross-sector coalition of estate agents, conveyancers, mortgage brokers and fintech organisations working to measurably improve property transaction outcomes across South Wales. Ultimately, we want openmoove to become the connective infrastructure for a more collaborative and transparent property industry, starting in Wales and scaling nationally.
What advice would you give other entrepreneurs considering AGP?
Come with real problems. The most useful sessions are the ones where you’re honest about what isn’t working rather than showcasing what is. The advisors AGP provides are most valuable when you give them something genuine to engage with. Use the network too; some of our most useful conversations came through introductions they facilitated. Finally, move faster than feels comfortable but build the foundations properly. Those two things often feel like they’re in tension with one another, but they don’t have to be.
Find out more about how the Accelerated Growth Programme can support your business.
Find out more about openmoove.