Zencity, a leading community engagement platform for local governments that features 8 in 10 of America’s largest cities among its customers, announced a $40 million Series C investment led by StepStone Group, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners. This brings the company’s total raised to $91 million and represents a meaningful increase in valuation from its previous fundraise.
The new funding will be invested in advancing Zencity’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including key hires in engineering and data science, and in enhanced customer service for Zencity’s local government partners on four continents.
Zencity’s impact comes after a decades-long decline in public trust in government and a recognition that building public trust requires that state and local governments continually engage the public, gathering community input on matters large and small. Zencity’s success has been driven by being an accessible and effective solution for city, county, and agency teams seeking to broaden an understanding of the views of the public, bring those insights into their day-to-day work, and communicate back-and-forth with the communities they serve.
As the company continues to execute on its commitment to responsible use of AI in the public sector, the company has also today launched the “Zencity AI Assistant” – which is a tool that drastically reduces the effort and time governments spend gathering and understanding community input. The new Zencity AI Assistant will:
1.) Create new engagement projects, survey questions, suggest images, create landing pages, and translate them into dozens of languages for maximum accessibility automatically.
2.) Serves as an analyst and answers questions instantly about data in plain language, cross-referencing from multiple sources, including surveys and social media, dramatically improving the ability to draw insights quickly.
3.) Create charts and reports while providing written and visual context for leaders, enabling the seamless integration of community input in decision-making meetings and other workflows.
This tool is now available in a closed beta for select Zencity customers, and will be generally available this summer, and the company is working on several other exciting releases in engagement in data analysis over the coming months.
The company also recently added the City of New York, Dallas, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the London Metropolitan Police (UK) as customers, and its first national government agency, the United Kingdom Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. And the company today serves cities, counties and agencies in over 40 US states, and covers a global footprint of over 200 million people.
KEY QUOTES:
“Zencity’s mission is to build trust between local governments and the communities that they serve. Our new partnership with StepStone will enable us to set the standard for this important mission through investment in technology, people, and most of all – in our partners. AI-powered capabilities, like the one we’re launching today, put best-in-class technology in the hands of local government leaders that will accelerate that goal, by lowering barriers to seeking community input, and more easily making sense of data we will drive outcomes for the communities that our government partners serve.”
– Eyal Feder-Levy, CEO, Zencity
“We believe Zencity could be the category leader in public engagement for the massive government market. Zencity is already used to support essential functions in cities from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, and we see a significant opportunity for Zencity to consolidate this fragmented market by delivering next-generation, AI-powered tools that will likely displace legacy solutions over the years to come.”
– John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group
