“Six years is forever in a startup’s life,” says Eyal Feder-Levy, a cofounder and CEO of Zencity, who last spoke with ISRAEL21c in 2018. 

Zencity describes itself as a company that is building trust between local governments and communities that they serve. (“Local governments are in charge of everything that makes up our life.”)

The Israel-founded startup uses AI and big data to scour sources and help local governments make decisions by taking into account the needs of residents. 

Zero to 100

“Back when we spoke in 2018, we were working with only about 10 cities,” Feder-Levy tells ISRAEL21c.

Now, its services are used by more than 300 local government agencies worldwide, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Tel Aviv and Eilat. 

Besides expanding beyond its Tel Aviv office space, the company has also expanded in size. In 2018, Zencity had 10 full-time employees. It now employs 120 people across all its offices. 

Founded in 2015, the company had raised $3 million by 2018. In June 2024, its latest funding round raised $40 million, bringing the total to $91 million. 

The evolution of methodology

Feder-Levy explains that governments spend “incredibly large” amounts of money annually, which is essentially our tax funds.  

“The annual budget for the city of New York this past year was $111 billion; the annual budget for Tel Aviv, which is only 500,000 people, was 10 billion shekels [$2.7 billion],” he says.

“The problem is that [local governments] have no way of knowing if they are doing a good job, thus no way of building trust with the community; if people don’t trust the municipality, that puts a stick in the wheel of a lot of its services.”  

Feder-Levy says the way Zencity approaches the problem is by understanding what the community cares about, its priorities and concerns, and communicates that information to the local government. 

Back in 2018, the company was accomplishing this service solely by aggregating communications coming both from official channels (emails to the city, the municipality’s call center logs) and unofficial channels (what people are posting on Facebook, Twitter and other social-media platforms).

“Over the years we’ve added more tools, such as representative surveys,” notes Feder-Levy. 

“We’ve also developed the ability to integrate with city services and create engagement websites where the city can share plans about a specific project, and have a dialogue with their community about it.” 

Zencity has not entered the European market so far, with the exception of the UK, but Feder-Levy hopes as the company expands, so will its corporate horizons. 

“Even though we have grown a lot, we’re still a startup; we need to prioritize our efforts, and the US market is our top priority at the moment.” 

Post-October 7

Feder-Levy met his Zencity cofounder Ido Ivri in late 2014 through a mutual friend. They sat down for a cup of coffee to discuss the idea of smart cities, and have been friends and business partners ever since.

Ivri, currently the CTO of Zencity, has been on reserve duty — along with two other senior Zencity staff members — since the October 7 Hamas attacks that precipitated the conflict in Gaza.

“We also have an engineering team based in the West Bank; it has been incredibly humbling to see the cooperation between our Israeli and Palestinian teams over the past 10 months,” he notes.

“It’s an inspiring example of how we can coexist in the world post-October 7, which brings me, personally, a lot of hope.”

Feder-Levy adds the company has been getting a lot of support from its international customers, who have been “checking in on us and our families.”

“This is maybe unlike what you hear in the media, but we received a lot of support and understanding.” 

For more information on Zencity, click here.