City Detect, which uses artificial intelligence to help cities stay safe and clean, has raised a $13 million Series A

City Detect, a company that uses vision AI to help local governments monitor the health of buildings and neighborhoods, on Friday announced a $13 million funding round led by Prudence Venture Capital.

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 decay.” The idea was to use advanced computer vision and artificial intelligence technology to help cities track and fix such problems.

City Detect installs cameras on public vehicles like garbage trucks and street cleaners, takes images of surrounding buildings as those vehicles pass, and then uses computer vision to analyze the images. It’s basically Google Maps’ Street View feature, but focuses on making sure buildings are up to code.

“Problems could be graffiti, illegal dumping, or litter 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 a crew to clean everything up.

Right now, tracking dilapidated buildings is very manual, so Baum-Blake considers his competition “the status quo.”

“They are able to do 50 operations a week, while we are able to do thousands a week,” he said of the humans tasked with tracking deteriorating buildings.

The product, which Baum-Blake has patented, has some fun and essential features. The final reason is that faces and license plates are always blurred for privacy reasons; The first is that City Detect technology can distinguish between street art and vandalism. It also helps governments track whether owners are not maintaining their buildings properly.

“We are able to tell if there are structural issues with the roof or we are able to determine if there is storm damage,” Baum-Blake continued.

City Detect is present 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 (the AI ​​governance group), is SOC 2 Type II compliant (meaning it is independently certified regarding privacy), and follows its own Responsible AI Policy.

“We published our Responsible AI Policy in response to a consortium of local governments who stated they were looking for clarity on what vendors are actually willing to adhere to,” Baum-Blake said. “We have adhered 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 develop some storm damage detection technologies. It also wants to expand throughout the United States

“We are seeing tremendous efficiency gains across the departments we work with, we are seeing more blight cases being resolved without anyone receiving a citation, we are seeing tires and litter, and illegal dumping being mitigated quicker and being detected quicker,” he said. “It’s exciting to see tech-forward municipalities moving toward predictive AI like City Detect models.”

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