The platform that turned community trust into something a city can actually measure, earn, and build.
Zencity - the mint brandmark, born 2016 in Tel Aviv, now running in city halls from Los Angeles to Leeds.
Every local government has the same blind spot. The people who show up to the 7 p.m. council meeting are rarely a fair sample of the community. The rest - tens of thousands of residents - vent on Facebook, email a public-comment inbox, argue on Reddit, or simply say nothing. Zencity was built to close that gap.
Founded in 2016 by Eyal Feder-Levy and Ido Ivri, Zencity is a govtech company that describes itself, plainly, as the platform for community trust. It pulls in public signals from social media, news, and direct resident input, runs them through natural-language processing, and pairs that stream with statistically representative surveys. The output is a read on what residents actually think - and, crucially, whether they trust the institutions serving them.
More than 600 government agencies now use it. That list spans Los Angeles, Chicago, and Harris County, Texas, alongside mid-size cities like Greensboro, Fort Lauderdale, and Colorado Springs. Users are city managers, communications directors, planners, and police leadership - the people who have to make a call and defend it.
What makes the company unusual is the metric it chose to organize around. Most software sells efficiency or reach. Zencity sells trust: a slippery, human thing it insists can be measured, benchmarked against similar communities, and improved over time.
Public meetings and comment periods over-index on the few. Representative surveys and social listening surface residents who never raise their hand.
Budgets, plans, and communications often rest on anecdote. Zencity gives staff defensible data to justify where money and attention go.
Public confidence in government and police is fragile and usually invisible until a crisis. Zencity tracks it continuously so leaders can act early.
The customers are almost entirely public sector: local and county governments, state agencies, and law enforcement organizations, spread across the US and, increasingly, the UK. It is a business-to-government model in a market notorious for long sales cycles and cautious buyers - which makes the 600-agency footprint its own kind of proof.
AI monitoring of social media, news, and public sources that surfaces what residents say about a city and its services in real time, with sentiment and topic analysis.
Statistically representative resident surveys - Community Survey, Pulse, and Experience - run continuously and benchmarked against similar communities.
Targeted outreach tools to reach communities with the right message, including during crises and emergency communication.
A recurring, representative survey measuring a community's sense of safety and trust in law enforcement - block by block.
An ongoing survey tracking resident satisfaction with the community and local services, benchmarked against a cohort of peer communities.
Synthesizes community input across every channel into plain-language summaries and answers, so staff spend less time reading and more time acting.
Zencity has raised roughly $93M across four main rounds, backed by TLV Partners, Vertex Ventures Israel, M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund), Salesforce Ventures, and - leading the 2024 Series C - StepStone Group.
The Series C arrived alongside a new generative AI Assistant, signaling where the company is pointing next: less dashboard, more synthesis. Estimated annual revenue sits around $10M (a third-party figure, not company-confirmed).
The civic-engagement market is crowded. Polco runs resident surveys and budget simulations. Granicus sells a broad suite of government websites and communications. Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab) and Bang the Table focus on participation platforms. Fraym and Citibeats work the AI-analytics angle.
Zencity's difference is one of emphasis. Rather than offering a standalone survey tool or a website builder, it fuses real-time AI social listening with representative surveys and then embeds the result inside the workflows public servants already own - budgeting, annual planning, and resident communications. The unifying idea is trust as a measurable outcome, not engagement as an activity.
That focus also shaped its expansion. In January 2025 Zencity acquired Commonplace, a UK engagement platform strong in planning and zoning, whose clients include the City of London and councils in Westminster, Leeds, and Camden. The move added land-use expertise and a British footprint in one step.
Eyal Feder-Levy and Ido Ivri launch the company in Tel Aviv to help local governments understand their communities.
TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures back a US expansion push into local government.
Salesforce Ventures joins a $30M round; Blockwise launches to measure resident trust in police.
StepStone Group leads a $40M round paired with a new generative AI Assistant for government teams.
Buys the UK planning-engagement platform, adding zoning and land-use tools and a British client base.
An urban-planning background before govtech: he helped found Tel Aviv University's City Center for cities and urbanism and sits on the World Economic Forum's Future of Cities advisory board. He built the tool he wished cities had.
Leads the engineering and data science behind Zencity's NLP pipeline - the machinery that turns 250M+ raw civic signals a year into structured, usable insight.
Zencity sits at the intersection of three markets investors like: AI, government software, and public trust. It is dual-homed by design - commercial teams in New York, R&D in Tel Aviv - and its wedge is a metric almost no competitor centers on. In a sector where software often gets bought and shelved, a 600-agency install base is the clearest signal that the listening problem it set out to solve is real.
Zencity is a govtech platform that helps local governments measure and build community trust by combining AI social listening, representative resident surveys, and communication tools into insight that guides decisions, budgets, and policy.
More than 600 local governments, counties, state agencies, and public safety organizations - including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Harris County, TX - use Zencity, with city managers, communications teams, and police leadership as primary users.
Zencity was founded in 2016 by Eyal Feder-Levy (CEO) and Ido Ivri (CTO), with headquarters in New York and R&D in Tel Aviv.
Zencity has raised roughly $93M in total, including a $13.5M Series A (2020), a $30M Series B (2021), and a $40M Series C led by StepStone Group (2024).
Zencity centers everything on the single metric of community trust, pairing statistically representative surveys with real-time AI social listening and embedding results directly into government workflows rather than offering standalone survey or website tools.