Richard Samuel, CEO of August, joins Sunny Ray to explain how his company is building the operating system for the UK's private rented sector. With 2.7 million landlords in the UK, most managing just one to five properties on spreadsheets, bank statements, WhatsApp and Gmail, new regulation like the Renters Rights Act and Making Tax Digital created urgent pressure to professionalize. August replaces that patchwork with a single platform, using AI, built early on, to read historical data, automate onboarding, track rent through open banking, and manage compliance and maintenance. Samuel traces his path from a decade in management consulting through roles including HSBC, Mind Gym and a family office to joining co-founder Sam as CEO, drawn by a compelling idea, strong angel backing and a rare design sensibility for a stayed industry. He discusses why bad landlording is usually a paperwork problem rather than malice, why fundraising should follow proven growth rather than precede it, and how August's content heavy SEO and generative search strategy now drives most of its inbound growth.
Richard Samuel explains how August is replacing spreadsheets with an AI powered operating system for the UK's 2.7 million landlords.
What is August and why does it matter now for UK landlords?
The UK has 2.7 million landlords, most with one to five properties, who have run their business on spreadsheets, bank statements, WhatsApp and Gmail. The Renters Rights Act and Making Tax Digital, which requires quarterly digital tax reporting, created strong tailwinds. August is a property management platform that replaces spreadsheets and email so landlords can manage everything from one place.
How does AI fit into the product?
AI was central from the start; we built that capability around Q1 last year. It reads the core record of platform data to give portfolio level views across properties, tenancies and landlords. It also makes onboarding easier, since landlords can upload years of spreadsheet history and AI reads it to populate property addresses and tenancies automatically.
Looking at your background across management consulting, HSBC, Mind Gym and a family office, what's the thread running through it all?
I spent 10 years as a management consultant in financial services strategy and operations, which gave me a strong understanding of business and how to improve things. Wanting to actually apply that, I spent the last decade as a builder and operator, taking on increasing responsibility building products and teams before eventually running a company.
You call yourself a COO type, so what made you join August as CEO?
I actually joined as CEO alongside founder Sam, who first hit the tenant side of the problem himself, built an app, then realized the economics worked better for landlords. He had a compelling idea, strong angel investors already behind him and a genuinely good design sense that the property industry lacks. Those three things convinced me to join the mission.
What was the first business problem you solved by building software instead of hiring more people?
At a previous edtech business I analyzed the underlying model and found prepackaged products carried 80 percent gross margin, but the team had no product catalog, so they sometimes thought they had a file and didn't. I built a basic Airtable backed catalog with a website front end so the sales team could confidently sell what we actually had in stock.
You've said bad landlording is almost never malice. What convinced you of that?
It's like the Pareto principle: 80 to 90 percent of landlords want to do the right thing. The real issue is a missed deadline, disorganized paperwork, or lack of an audit trail if something lands in a property court. Fines today are disproportionate to small slip ups, so we see real anxiety from landlords who just need to be more organized and professional.
You've said fundraising is downstream of growth work, not parallel to it. Why do most founders get that order backwards?
We were conservative with cash and upfront with investors about the experience we wanted to build, keeping a small, tight, low cost team. We focused on proving landlords not only sign up but stay, connect their bank account, and start loving automated rent tracking and reminders. Now that we're seeing that growth accelerate, we're in the spot where we want to raise more.
You've built out an estate of 600 plus pages and now compete for AI citations as much as search positions. What's working?
It's a secret hobby of mine. We have about a thousand pages, 600 of them core functional pages, and use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to understand our search positions. We target both traditional search on Google and Bing and AI search citations, building a dictionary, blogs and interlinking assets to our commercial pages. Organic web now drives about 90 percent of our inbound acquisition.
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