From Welding Steel to Building Proptech: Meet Jack, Founder & CTO of Kotini

Part of what makes Circles House different isn't the rooftop or the coworking space, it's who you end up sharing them with. We sat down with Jack, a current member and the Founder & CTO of Kotini, to hear his story: from a four-year fabrication apprenticeship to building a proptech company from wherever he happens to be in the world. Below, he shares his story firsthand.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I'm Jack, Founder and CTO of Kotini. My route here wasn't exactly conventional. I started with a four-year apprenticeship as a fabricator, then completed a master's in Engineering before joining Jaguar Land Rover as a graduate engineer. After several years in heavy engineering, I moved into software, working remotely on products for courier and fulfilment businesses. In 2022, I co-founded Kotini.

I've gone from welding steel to writing software to building a company. As CTO, I lead both technology and product, and these days I do it from wherever I happen to be in the world. Outside of work, I'm big on cycling, staying fit, and surrounding myself with people who are building ambitious things.

Tell us about your business: what is it and what impact do you want it to have?

Kotini is a proptech platform that automates onboarding and compliance for estate agents. We bring everything that happens at the start of a property transaction—ID and AML checks, contracts, privacy consents, material information, and client payments—into a single branded digital journey. What used to take agents hours of manual administration now takes clients around 60 seconds.

The immediate impact is simple: giving estate agents their time back. Every hour spent chasing paperwork and managing compliance is an hour they're not listing homes, serving clients, or growing their business. We remove that administrative burden so they can focus on what they do best.

The bigger ambition goes beyond onboarding. Buying and selling property in the UK is still slow, fragmented, and full of duplicated effort. The same information is collected repeatedly by different parties, often manually. We want to create a market where verified data moves securely between the right people, supported by a trust framework that keeps bad actors out. Faster transactions, fewer fall-throughs, lower costs, and a much better experience for everyone involved.

What has been the most exciting milestone of your business so far?

Two moments stand out.

Crossing £1 million in revenue proved that Kotini was a real business, not just an interesting idea. Customers were paying, the model worked, and we'd built something with genuine value.

But the moments that stay with me most are when someone uses the product—or spots the Kotini brand out in the wild—and can't quite believe it's us behind it. When something you've built feels much bigger and more established than the small team that created it, that's a brilliant feeling. It tells you the work is landing.

You went from writing code for other companies to building your own. What was the moment you knew you had to make that jump?

There wasn't one defining moment—it always felt inevitable.

I've had side projects and small businesses for as long as I can remember, and I always believed I could build something significant if I committed to it fully instead of squeezing it around someone else's roadmap. Eventually, the question stopped being, *"Could I?"* and became, *"Why haven't I?"*

So I took the leap.

Kotini sits at the intersection of tech and a very human process—buying a home. How do you keep the product human when your instinct is to engineer everything?

Kotini is the first consumer-facing product I've built. Before this, everything I worked on was either internal software or systems talking to other systems. The "user" was effectively another machine.

Building for real people is completely different. They're often stressed, short on time, and don't care how clever the technology is underneath—they just want it to work.

The challenge is that compliance and great user experience naturally pull in opposite directions. AML and onboarding demand more checks, more validation, and more friction. Users want the opposite. The real craft is finding the balance: staying watertight on compliance while making the experience feel effortless.

On top of that, we don't have a neat ideal customer profile to design around. Anyone can buy or sell a home. Our product has to work just as well for an 18-year-old first-time buyer as it does for a 99-year-old selling the family home. If it only works for people who think like you, it doesn't work.

You're someone who cares about fitness, community, cycling and healthy living. How much does your physical environment and the people around you shape the way you think and build?

Massively.

I don't do my best thinking sitting at a desk. Most of my ideas arrive while cycling, training, or simply moving. Being a digital nomad means I'm constantly changing environments, and I find that sharpens my thinking rather than distracting it.

The people around me matter even more. If you surround yourself with people who are fitter, smarter, and building harder things than you are, your own standards naturally rise. Comfortable environments tend to produce comfortable work.

What does a productive day actually look like for you right now?

It's changed dramatically over the life of Kotini.

In the early days, there were long stretches where the business simply needed me writing code for 12 hours a day. That was the right job at that stage.

Today, productivity looks almost the opposite. It's about protecting time for deep work on genuinely difficult problems, while also making time to train, get outside, and spend time with good people.

I've realised that being sharp matters far more than being busy. My best decisions come from a clear head, not from grinding myself into the ground. The trap for technical founders is staying in the code because it's the comfortable place to be. These days, a productive day usually involves spending as much time outside the code as inside it.

What's one thing most people get wrong about building a tech startup?

Two things.

First, people think it's all about the idea. It isn't—it's about the problem. If you've found a real problem, the solution will evolve over time anyway. You discover whether the problem is worth solving by talking to customers, not by disappearing into a room to build.

Second, people take startup advice far too seriously. Most founder advice is survivorship bias dressed up as wisdom. Someone did X, their company succeeded, so they assume X was the reason. Usually, it wasn't.

Listen to people's stories, learn from their experiences, but be sceptical of anyone—myself included—claiming they've found the formula. There isn't one.

What's next for you and Kotini?

As AI becomes more capable, trust becomes a much bigger problem. It's becoming easier to fake identities and harder to know what's genuine, which makes verified data more valuable than ever.

Our next focus is working more closely with governments, banks, and trusted institutions to access genuinely verified information. That means helping lenders make better-informed decisions while making the process significantly simpler for estate agents and their clients.

Our ambition is to become the trusted infrastructure that enables verified property and identity data to move securely across the market.

Personally, I want to spend more time speaking, writing, and telling Kotini's story beyond the day-to-day work of building the company.

Is there something you're looking for right now?

I'm always keen to connect with people working in decentralised data, verifiable credentials, trust frameworks, or open data standards.

I'd also love introductions to investors with experience in proptech or the property sector, as well as decision-makers at estate agencies who are looking to modernise the way they onboard clients.