City Detect, which uses AI to help cities stay safer and cleaner, raises $13M Series A
City Detect, a company that uses AI vision to help local governments monitor the health of buildings and neighborhoods, announced Friday a $13 million Series A round led by Prudence Venture Capital.
The startup launched in 2021, with Gavin Baum-Blake, the remaining founder, serving as CEO. He said the company was founded in part because cities were struggling to deal with “urban decay and decay.” The idea was to use advanced computer vision and AI technology to help cities track and fix such problems.
City Detect installs cameras in public vehicles such as garbage trucks and street sweepers, captures images of surrounding buildings as those vehicles pass, and then uses computer vision to analyze the images. Street View for Google Maps, but focuses on making sure buildings are up to code.
“Problems can be graffiti, illegal dumping, curbside trash,” Baum-Blake told TechCrunch. Then, City Detect works with local governments to fix the problems, a process that often involves local officials sending in a team to clean everything up.
Currently, tracking deteriorating buildings is a manual process, so Baum-Blake considers her competition “the status quo.”
“They can do 50 a week,” he said of the people tasked with tracking decaying buildings, “and we can do thousands a week.”
The product, approved by Baum-Blake, has some interesting and important features. The latter is that faces and license plates are often obscured for privacy reasons; the first is that City Detect’s technology can distinguish between street art and vandalism. It also helps governments track down landlords who aren’t taking good care of their properties.
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“We are able to see if there are any problems with the roof or we are able to identify if there is any damage caused by storms,” continued Baum-Blake.
City Detect is in at least 17 cities and works with local governments in places like Dallas and Miami. The company has raised $15 million in funding to date and is a member of the GovAI Coalition (an AI governance group), is SOC 2 Type II compliant (meaning independently certified for privacy), and follows its responsible AI policy.
“We published our Responsible AI policy in response to a coalition of local governments that wanted clarity on what vendors were willing to commit to,” Baum-Blake said. “We are committed to this goal so that our partners in the local government know what to expect from us.”
Baum-Blake said the new funding will be used to hire more engineers and develop some of the technology to detect storm damage. It also wants to expand across the US
“We see great success in all the departments we work with, we see many cases of damage being resolved without anyone receiving it, we see tires and garbage, and illegal waste disposal is removed quickly and quickly seen,” he said. “It’s great to see tech-forward municipalities relying on predictive AI like the City Detect models.”
Zeal Capital Partners, Knoll Ventures, and Las Olas Venture Capital also participated in the round.
