City Detect, a company that uses vision AI to help local governments monitor the health of buildings and neighborhoods, announced on Friday a $13 million Series A 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 AI technology to help cities track and fix such problems.
City Detect mounts cameras on public vehicles like garbage trucks and street sweepers, captures photos of surrounding buildings as those vehicles pass, then uses computer vision to analyze the images. It’s essentially a Google Maps Street View, but focused on ensuring buildings are up to code.
“The problems could be graffiti, illegal dumping, litter that’s on the side of the road,” Baum-Blake told TechCrunch. Then, City Detect works with local governments to fix the issues, a process that usually involves local officials sending a crew out to clean everything up.
Right now, tracking dilapidated buildings is very manual, so Baum-Blake considers his competition to be the “status quo.”
“They’re able to do 50 per week,” he said of humans tasked with keeping track of decaying buildings, “whereas we’re able to do thousands per week.”
The product, which Baum-Blake has patented, has some fun and essential 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 governments track whether landlords are not properly maintaining their buildings.
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