For cities, keeping track of street-level problems is costly, and methods for keeping track of issues involving items like unlicensed dumpsters and low-reflective street signs are incredibly inefficient. CityScan, a Chicago-based startup, aims to use technology to keep track of such problems, eliminating or at least reducing the need for workers to monitor them.
“Municipalities are cash-strapped and find it increasingly difficult to understand what's happening outdoors,” says Orlando Saez, CityScan’s COO. “CityScan eliminates the frustration of manual permit regulation, by providing updated and comprehensive actionable street-level insights and automating many steps in this process to actually generate revenue from code enforcement on various fee-based licensing activities such as billboards and awnings.”
CityScan recently raised $1.2 million in a seed stage round from investors and CEOs from the west coast and midwest. Saez hopes to bring the amount to $1.5 million before closing the round within a few weeks. “This will give us enough capital to work well into 2013 as we continue to build our platform and bring our initial pilots and customers,” he says.
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A laser-type remote sensing technology – also known as LiDAR – underlies CityScan’s system. Strategic partner Nokia/NAVTEQ provides street-level maps and LiDAR datasets that allow CityScan to create detailed 3D cityscape models and use information gathered by cars driving through cities to see where things don’t match up. Then, pre-planning, modeling, and extraction tools can identify various features such as billboards, debris, and signage. By evaluating the conditions of these items and comparing against municipal records, CityScan can help cities enforce codes and permits, as well as see what potentially dangerous elements may be on the streets.
At the moment, CityScan has no clients but is in talks with potential customers in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Boston, and Naperville. Each city has different needs, for which CityScan plans to build personalized applications. Saez says CityScan may consider moving into other U.S. cities to work with out-of-home media companies by leveraging the Nokia/NAVTEQ data.
To Saez, CityScan is more than a vendor. Rather than being viewed as a service provider, CityScan wants to have a hand in improving communities as partners. “We bring a unique access to technology and skills where we can quickly translate this value to meet a huge public need with little or no capital risk to municipalities. We are successful only if we can deliver positive economic impact to municipalities,” he says. “This is the best framework for a long term partnership.”
Visit CityScan’s website and follow them on Twitter at @1cityscan.
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