City Detect, which uses AI to help cities become safer and cleaner, raises $13M Series A

City DetectA 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 was launched in 2021, and Gavin Baum-Blake, the remaining co-founder, is the CEO. He said the company was founded in part because cities are struggling 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 places cameras on public vehicles such as garbage trucks and street sweepers, captures images of buildings around the vehicles as they pass, and then uses computer vision to analyze the images. It’s Google Maps Street View, but it’s more focused on making sure buildings are in good condition.

“The problems can be graffiti, illegal dumping, trash on the side of the road,” Baum-Blake told TechCrunch. Then, City Detect works with local governments to fix these problems, a process that often involves local authorities sending in workers to clean everything up.

Right now, investigating damaged buildings is a manual process, so Baum-Blake sees his competition as “status quo.”

“They can do 50 a week,” he said of the people whose job it is to look after damaged buildings, “but we can do thousands a week.”

The product, which Baum-Blake holds a patent for, has some interesting and important features. The result is that faces and license plates are always obscured for privacy reasons; the old thing is that City Detect technology can distinguish between street art and vandalism. It also helps the authorities to know if the landlords are not taking good care of their houses.

“We can see if there’s a roof problem or we can tell if there’s storm damage,” Baum-Blake said.

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 to date and is a member of the GovAI Coalition (AI control panel), corresponds to SOC 2 Type II (meaning it has an independent history to keep it private), and follow its own AI strategy.

“We published our Responsible AI policy in response to a group of local governments who said they wanted to clarify what vendors are willing to do,” Baum-Blake said. “We committed to this process so that our local government employees know what to expect from us.”

Baum-Blake said the new money will be used to hire more engineers and improve technology to detect hurricane damage. It also wants to expand throughout the US

“We are seeing great benefits in all the departments we work with, we are seeing many problems being solved without anyone getting a word, we are seeing tires and trash, and littering disappearing quickly and being identified quickly,” he said. “It’s great to see municipalities at the forefront of technology leaning into predictive AI like City Detect models.”

Zeal Capital Partners, Knoll Ventures, and Las Olas Venture Capital also participated.