New Funding Boost for Local Government Data-Driven Decisions

Earlier this month I was thrilled to announce that Zencity has raised $13.5M in new funding. This round is a huge, meaningful milestone for us and I want to take this opportunity to share why it is especially exciting right now and how we’re planning to use the funding to continue working tirelessly for our local government customers.

First, I want to welcome Eitan and TLV partners, as well as Alex, Julie and Salesforce Ventures to our journey, and say a huge thank you to them and to all of our existing partners, Canaan Partners Israel, Vertex Ventures, M12 and i3equity Partners, all of which took part in this round to the fullest extent possible. Thank you for taking this journey with us. 

Ever since Ido and I founded Zencity, we had one clear mission in front of us – out of a huge belief in the importance of great local government, we wanted to help these organizations understand the voice, needs and priorities of the communities they serve in order to help them make better decisions.

This mission has never been more important than today. With local governments on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, working tirelessly to serve their communities in this impossible reality, resident feedback becomes a critical necessity. In this crisis, local governments face a host of unique challenges – creating and enforcing social distancing policies, supporting local businesses and people facing unemployment, managing health services, and above all – providing their citizens with accurate and timely information. All of these challenges require an understanding of their residents’ needs, concerns and priorities in real time and on a wide-scale, to get a quick feedback loop as they shape their policies, actions and messaging.

We feel it with our customers. Not only have we seen a huge increase in the usage of our platform among our existing local government customers since the start of the pandemic, but also growth. In fact, over the past few months we were thrilled to add dozens of government agencies to our network of over 150 cities and counties, from big cities like Austin, TX and Los Angeles, CA to smaller communities like Oak Ridge, TN. Thanks to our AI-based out-of-the-box setup we have been able to onboard these new cities and counties incredibly quickly. Additionally, in order to meet this high demand, we’ve uploaded a dedicated COVID-19 toolkit full of new features and resources for our cities and counties, and we have even released a few case studies detailing how some of these agencies used our platform.

With this new round of funding, we plan to continue to expand our product’s ability to serve this crucial need. We are building exciting new AI capabilities, as well as new ways to intake data into our analysis. The funding will also aid in building out new strategic partnerships and further expand the reach of our impact. 

One of the most exciting things about this funding round for me personally, is how this money will go directly into serving local governments. The incredibly powerful thing about the SaaS model within government  is it allows agencies of all different sizes to access cutting-edge technologies that millions of dollars were invested in building, and the scalability makes it sustainable. I hope this urges more government agencies to adopt SaaS solutions and more entrepreneurs to look at this space as a meaningful one. If you’re thinking about it, I invite you to read Eitan’s great blog post on why he chose to lead this round. 

As a final note, I want to say how grateful I am to our 150+ cities and counties of all sizes, across four countries and 29 U.S. states, for choosing our services and teaching us what hard work and devotion really is. It is a privilege to work alongside you and continue to support your literally life-saving work. 

And last but not least, I owe a huge thank you to the 70 amazing team members who make up Zencity, that work tirelessly to turn our vision into a reality and to serve our 150+ cities and counties and their 35 million residents around the world.

Now onwards to the next milestone!