AI startup City Detect secures $13M Series A to help cities improve safety and cleanliness

City Detect, a startup that uses vision AI to help local governments keep tabs on the condition of buildings and neighbourhoods, said on Friday that it has raised a $13 million Series A round led by Prudence Venture Capital.

The company launched in 2021, and Gavin Baum-Blake, the remaining co-founder, is its CEO. He said the business was created in part because many cities were struggling to addresswhat he described as “urban blight and decay.” The goal was to apply advanced computer vision and AI tools to help municipalities identify and address such problems.

City Detect installs cameras on public service vehicles such as garbage trucks and street sweepers, takes photos of nearby buildings as those vehicles move through city streets, and then applies computer vision to study the images. In practice, it works like Google Maps Street View, but with a focus on verifying whether properties meet code requirements.

“The problems could be graffiti, illegal dumping, litter that’s on the side of the road,” Baum-Blake said. City Detect then works alongside local governments to resolve those issues, which often means city officials dispatching a crew to clean up the affected area.

At the moment, monitoring deteriorating buildings remains a very manual task, so Baum-Blake sees the main competitor as the “status quo.”

“They’re able to do 50 per week,” he said of people responsible for tracking rundown properties, “whereas we’re able to do thousands per week.”

The product, which Baum-Blake said he has patented, includes both practical and distinctive features. On the practical side, faces and license plates are always blurred to protect privacy. On the more unusual side, the company’s technology can distinguish between street art and vandalism. It also gives governments a way to monitor whether landlords are failing to maintain their properties properly.

“We’re able to see if there’s structural roof issues or we’re able to identify if there’s been storm damage,” Baum-Blake added.

City Detect now operates in at least 17 cities and works with local governments in Dallas and Miami. The startup has raised $15 million in total funding so far and is part of the GovAI Coalition, an AI governance collective. It is also SOC 2 Type II compliant, meaning it has undergone independent certification for privacy, and it follows its own responsible AI policy.

“We published our Responsible AI policy in response to a consortium of local governments that stated they were looking for clarity on what vendors were actually willing to commit to,” Baum-Blake said. “We committed to this policy so that our local government partners could know what to expect from us.”

Baum-Blake said the new capital will be used to hire additional engineers and further develop the company’s storm-damage detection technology. City Detect also plans to continue expanding across the U.S.

“We are seeing huge efficiency gains across the departments that we work with, we’re seeing more instances of blight being solved without anyone receiving a citation, we’re seeing tyres and litter, and illegal dumping being abated quicker and detected quicker,” he said. “It’s exciting to see technology-forward municipalities lean into predictive AI like City Detect’s models.”

Zeal Capital Partners, Knoll Ventures, and Las Olas Venture Capital also took part in the round.