Zencity Gained $40M in Funding and Created an AI Assistant

Written by Eyal Feder Levy | Jun 18, 2024 1:00:00 PM

Committed to our mission - building trust

At Zencity, our commitment (and obsession) is one—we want to solve the critical societal challenge of fostering trust between communities and the agencies that serve them. We believe that Community Trust is the "key currency" local governments need to perform their essential duties effectively, and research shows that trust, which is at an all-time low, is built when agencies consistently meet and exceed their community's expectations.

However, understanding those expectations is becoming increasingly hard as most existing tools are limited to engaging the "STPs"—the "Same Ten People” who always participate and get overcounted, while other voices are not heard. Our platform was built especially to leverage digital technology’s ability to be proactively inclusive, to hear from many more voices and use this wide scale input to make effective decisions.

Based on this approach, over the last few years, Zencity has become the leading platform for building community trust - serving hundreds of major government agencies, including the five largest US cities (NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix), agencies in over 40 states, and prominent cities worldwide like London, Ottawa and Tel Aviv. I know I speak for all of us at Zencity, we’re extremely proud to be the world’s largest community engagement platform - our customers serve a population of almost 200 million people.

Today, we mark a very exciting milestone - new funding and new capabilities

But we’re only getting started. Today, we are excited to announce that Zencity has raised $40M in our Series C funding round to continue building our Platform for Community Trust. A great new ally has joined us in the effort to enable governments to be more responsive to the communities they serve - the StepStone group. We’ve gotten to know the StepStone team over the last year, and we are honored by their confidence in us and our conviction in our mission. John Avirett, who led the investment for StepStone, together with Hunter, Anthony, and the rest of the team, knows the govtech industry well, and we’re delighted to have the firm backing our next era – and equally delighted to have our existing investors Eitan Bek and the TLV partners team continue supporting our vision.

What does this mean for our customers?

It means, first and foremost, that we can meaningfully increase our impact for our partners in government by making our product more useful, more effective, and easier to use for the mission of increasing community trust.

To that end, we are committed to bringing the latest, most powerful advances to the government market, which is traditionally underserved with technology. We think that the public sector deserves access to the same world-changing technology as the private sector.

AI has always been a part of our toolset. As a recognized leader in responsible AI for government, being the only govtech company named in the CB Insights AI100 list and the first company to release GenAI features for local government, we have witnessed remarkable momentum over the past 18 months as more agencies move to embrace AI. But with this momentum, we feel a profound responsibility to set the standard for quality AI usage in local government, ensuring both that it genuinely provides value and enhances government operations and that it is deployed safely.

Introducing - The Zencity AI Assistant

Today, after months of dedicated work, we are excited to unveil the next stage of our work with AI: the Zencity AI Assistant. Our Assistant introduces a layer of automation across the Zencity platform, enabling various functionalities, from creating engagement websites from scratch to answering questions about survey results to cross-referencing data from all of our various tools and sharing full reports. The Assistant drastically reduces the effort and time governments spend gathering and analyzing community input.
Learn more here:

This AI Assistant will only become more capable as we continue to invest in it, and we’d love to hear from you about how it can be enhanced to make an even greater impact. The Assistant is rolling out to select Zencity partners in the coming days and will be available to all of our partners this summer. If you’re interested in early access, please sign up here.

A step on the way to a vision of Trust

This release is not just a step forward; it's a leap toward our larger vision of radically improving trust-building processes with technology. We believe that today’s tools can allow us to remove barriers for more people to participate and make community input a usable source of information in decision-making processes.
With our meaningful new funding, we are poised to bring this vision to life, investing in exciting new capabilities that will empower our partners in government and public safety.

We extend a ton of gratitude to our investors, both new and old, for supporting our journey, to our global team for their relentless hard work, and most of all, to our partners in government for their unwavering dedication to serving their communities.

Together, we are on a path to transform how trust is built and strengthened in our communities, paving the way to radically improve life in local communities.

Onwards and upwards!

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