City Detect, a company that uses vision AI 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 founded in 2021, with remaining co-founder Gavin Baum Blake serving as CEO. He said the company was founded in part because cities are struggling to deal with “urban blight and decay.” The idea was to use advanced computer vision and AI technology to help cities track and solve such problems.
City Detect attaches cameras to public vehicles such as garbage trucks and street sweepers, takes pictures of surrounding buildings as they pass, and uses computer vision to analyze the images. It’s essentially Google Maps Street View, but with a focus on making sure buildings are up to code.
“The problem could be graffiti, illegal dumping, roadside trash,” Baum-Blake told TechCrunch. City Detect then works with local authorities to resolve the issue. This process usually requires local government officials to send out crews to clean everything.
Currently, tracking aging buildings is so manual that Baumbrake considers his competitors to be “status quo.”
“They can do 50 jobs a week; we can do thousands of jobs a week,” he said of the people tasked with tracking down decaying buildings.
This Baum-Blake patented product has several fun and important features. The latter is that faces and license plates are always blurred for privacy reasons. The former is that City Detect’s technology can distinguish between street art and vandalism. It also helps the government track whether landlords are not properly maintaining their buildings.
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“We can see if there are structural issues with the roof or identify if there has been storm damage,” Baumbrake continued.
City Detect is active in at least 17 cities and works with local governments such as Dallas and Miami. The company has raised $15 million in funding to date, is a member of the GovAI Coalition, is SOC 2 Type II compliant (i.e., independently certified for privacy), and follows its own Responsible AI Policy.
“We published the Responsible AI Policy in response to a consortium of local governments who said they wanted clarity on what vendors were actually actively working on,” Baum-Blake said. “We are working on this policy so that our local government partners know what they can expect from us.”
Baumbrake said the new funding will be used to hire more engineers and advance some of the technology to detect storm damage. We are also aiming to expand throughout the United States.
“We’re seeing significant efficiency gains across the sectors we work with, we’re seeing more outbreaks being resolved without anyone receiving a citation, and we’re seeing tires and trash and illegal dumping being put down faster and detected more quickly,” he said. “It’s interesting 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.
