City detectiona company that uses AI vision to help local governments monitor the health of buildings and neighborhoods, announced a $13 million Series A round led by Prudence Venture Capital on Friday.
The startup launched in 2021 and Gavin Baum-Blake, the remaining co-founder, serves as CEO. He said the company was founded in part because cities were struggling to deal with “urban blight and rot.” The idea was to use advanced computer vision and artificial intelligence technology to help cities monitor and fix such problems.
City Detect attaches cameras to public vehicles such as garbage trucks and street sweepers, captures photos of surrounding buildings as those vehicles pass, and then uses computer vision to analyze the images. It’s essentially a Google Maps Street View, but focuses on making sure buildings are up to code.
“Problems can be graffiti, illegal dumping, trash lying on the side of the road,” Baum-Blake told TechCrunch. City Detect then works with local governments to fix the problems, a process that usually involves local officials sending in a crew to clean everything up.
Right now, monitoring abandoned buildings is very manual, so Baum-Blake sees his competition as the “status quo.”
“They can do 50 a week,” he said of the people tasked with monitoring the deteriorating buildings, “whereas we’re able to do thousands a week.”
The product, which Baum-Blake has patented, has some fun and essential features. The last one is that faces and license plates are always blurred for privacy reasons. The first is that City Detect’s technology can distinguish between street art and vandalism. It also helps governments monitor if owners are not maintaining their buildings properly.
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“We’re able to see if there are structural roof issues or we’re able to identify if there was storm damage,” Baum-Blake continued.
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 collective), is compatible with SOC 2 Type II (meaning it is independently certified for privacy), and follows its own responsible AI policy.
“We published our Responsible AI policy in response to a consortium of local governments who said they were looking for clarity on what vendors were actually willing to commit to,” said Baum-Blake. “We committed to this policy so that our local government partners know what to expect from us.”
Baum-Blake said the new funding will be used to hire more engineers and advance some of the storm damage detection technology. It also wants to expand across the US
“We’re seeing huge efficiency gains in all the departments we work with, we’re seeing more infection cases being resolved without anyone getting a report, we’re seeing tires and litter and illegal dumping going down faster and being detected faster,” he said. “It’s exciting to see tech-forward municipalities leaning into predictive AI like City Detect’s models.”
Zeal Capital Partners, Knoll Ventures and Las Olas Venture Capital also participated in the round.
