How Zencity CEO Eyal Feder-Levy grew Zencity to $10M revenue and 400 customers in 2025.

Nathan Latka (00:00) Hey folks, my guest today is Eyal Fadar-Levy. He's the CEO and co-founder of ZenCity, the platform that uses advanced AI to help local government agencies reach residents, understand them, and act based off insights powering the work of government with community voices. They work with over 400 agencies as well, zencity.io. Eyal, you ready to take us to the top? All right. So is this like when I'm in Austin, Texas, I get an alert on my phone that says, Eyal Feder-Levy (00:21) Let's do it Nathan, thanks for having me. Nathan Latka (00:27) Warning, flood warning, 3 p.m. tonight, text message, is that you? Eyal Feder-Levy (00:32) ⁓ We do some of that as well, but our main focus is finding you and asking you to give your feedback to the City of Austin. Tell the city how they're doing. Think about it as an NPS for government, if you will. Nathan Latka (00:42) Okay, how would the local city of Austin, if they're a customer of you, get a link to me personally, a community member to collect my feedback? Eyal Feder-Levy (00:51) So let's take it a step back for a second. Local governments are probably the institutions with the most impact on our lives. We don't think about it that often, but they're in charge of public safety, public health, infrastructure, trash pickup. Like everything that allows us to live our lives in beautiful cities like Austin are the direct responsibility of the city's county state agencies that serve us as residents. To do that, they manage incredibly large budgets. Do know, example, how much money, I'm based in Brooklyn, how much money the city of New York spends every year? ⁓ Nathan Latka (01:18) ⁓ definitely north of three billion. Eyal Feder-Levy (01:23) definitely north of 3 billion. The budget that's being discussed right now for July is $122 billion a year. That's a lot of money. This industry spends $3.3 trillion a year just in the US. So they do all these things and they don't know if they're doing a good job or not. They never know like how well are we doing on trash bag? How well are we doing on public safety? Do people in Austin feel safe? So we've built a bunch of ways to reach people like you and hear from you. Do you think the city is doing a good job to help them? Nathan Latka (01:29) my gosh. Eyal Feder-Levy (01:52) harder decisions around budgeting, around policy, around things like that. Nathan Latka (01:55) But what is, I mean tell me specifically though, because every link I get from the government I just ignore it. I'm going, there's no upside for me. I'm not gonna take five minutes to fill out a survey. I'm not doing this. And obviously your solution, no one's gonna pay for it if it gets no responses. So what have you figured out? Eyal Feder-Levy (02:08) 100 % agree with you. What we found is that people actually want to their input. just as you said, it feels like throwing your voice into the void and it feels like a lot of work. You need to show up at a meeting, you need to find a babysitter, you need to take a day off work just to give your input. We've built a lot of ways to reach people by leveraging the fact that they're spending time online. So we combine social media and media monitoring capabilities. We pick up whatever people are already sharing on Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or wherever they're talking. We've built technology to run scientific grade representative surveys via digital ads. So basically we buy ads that are targeting people that live in Austin, for example, buy their demographic ⁓ information and then ask them to give us their input. And that works really, really well. And we build more classic engagement tools like post interaction surveys, you know, when we send you a text message after you called 3-1-1 or after you went to get a permit ⁓ and more classic digital engagement websites. But those are basically the different ways we reach. Nathan Latka (03:04) interesting. And so what does, I'm going to force you to do an average here because I'm sure you have a wide range of pricing, but what does the average government pay you per month or per year to use your technology? Eyal Feder-Levy (03:15) So it varies by population size. So big cities like Austin pay us more than smaller communities like don't know, Sugarland, Texas, or I don't know, Denton, Texas. And pricing starts from about 10, 20K a year for smaller municipalities and our largest customers pay us about a million. Nathan Latka (03:33) Give me a sense, a million dollar a year customer would be a population of what, million people? Is it a one to one ratio? Eyal Feder-Levy (03:38) Yeah, for example, we work with national agencies in the UK, national government offices, or we work with the state of Arizona or some of the largest cities in the country. They would be in the hundreds of... Nathan Latka (03:51) One of the parts of the S1 when folks go public is they'll always talk about how many enterprise logos they have. Henry Shucks S1 in Zoom Info will say, 196 customers are paying us more than a million per year. This is a very thing to be proud of. Are you comfortable sharing how many folks you have that are more than a million a year? Eyal Feder-Levy (04:08) ⁓ So we have ⁓ in what we call our enterprise tier, which is a population of north of 350,000 residents. We have about 50 customers and they all pay us six figures or more. Nathan Latka (04:19) That's six figures or more, not seven figures. So more than 100 grand a year. Okay, great. That's still pretty darn good. How did you get started on this? Take me back to your first customer. What were you selling back then? Eyal Feder-Levy (04:21) Yeah. Yeah, exactly. ⁓ Well, I'm an urban planner by profession. Zensity is actually my first private sector job. ⁓ And my co-founder and I started this company out of a real pain that we felt in our day to day. We've been really passionate about government and really passionate about people's opportunity to participate in government. And as people working in and around government, we just felt that there aren't good enough tools to be able to actually hear from people. We saw our friends in the tech industry know everything there is to know about their users. Who's clicking what? How are they reacting? See the sessions in hot jar. While in government, we had no visibility to what the customers that we were serving that were paying us a lot of money and taxes every year, what they actually didn't want. So that was where we started. We started that social media monitoring aspect and grew over time ⁓ to ⁓ do ⁓ more and more ways of reaching. Nathan Latka (05:21) And so was June 2015, that's when you wrote the first line of code or was that first customer? Eyal Feder-Levy (05:26) That was first line of code. First customer took us about 18 months on this. We ran four or five different POCs with customers before that. But in the beginning of 2017, we had our first Nathan Latka (05:38) Okay, so got it. So you were building from 2015 to 2017. How did you fund that? Were you already super wealthy? Eyal Feder-Levy (05:44) No, we were very young and very stupid. ⁓ basically, what ⁓ Zensity does today was our fourth pivot. We built three different products in the same space before that between June of 2015 ⁓ and February of 2017, all of them with paying customers in government, ⁓ but none of them scaled to ⁓ really solve the problem like what Zensity does. Nathan Latka (06:10) It's really hard for a founder to shut down an early idea, especially if you have, you know, five, 10 K of revenue. It sounds like you had a couple of those, but you shut it down and moved on. How did you have that discipline? Why did you know it was the right time to shut those down and why stay on the current concept is N city. Eyal Feder-Levy (06:22) That's a really, really great question, Nathan. think it took a lot of guts to shut down something that somebody was paying for. ⁓ I think we mostly ⁓ just saw that we're, you we were really, really passionate about this problem and we saw that the solutions we were building were not making enough impact for our customers. Yeah, they were willing to pay for it, but they were not in love with the product. Their eyes weren't starry when they were using it. It was fine, ⁓ but not crazy. ⁓ And ⁓ we kept doing, you know, more research with them, asking more questions, we kept hearing from them that there's something else that they want more and pivoting to that next thing as we working. Nathan Latka (06:58) Okay, so 2017 is your first customer. Fast forward to today, how many customers are you working with? Eyal Feder-Levy (07:02) you So little bit over 400 customers today. ⁓ yeah, we're originally founded in Tel Aviv, started with a few cities back in Israel, and today most of our customers are in North America, in the US. Nathan Latka (07:18) Very cool. Okay. So started in Tel Aviv. I have to also ask too, you know, I've never met, maybe I have a selection bias, but anyone who served in the IDF, I mean, really, man, mean, there's so many of them, I could go on and on. They all seem to build successful software companies. Are they teaching you, you know, while you're going through military training, are they also teaching you how to build a software company or what's going on here? Eyal Feder-Levy (07:24) Thank Well, know, everybody in Israel has to go to the army, so we all get that training. But I think it mostly teaches you grit and working towards a goal. We learned that early on. I think that's a privilege. And also we go to school at a later age, so we know a little bit more about what we want and what we want to do. Nathan Latka (07:56) Well hey, tell me more about how you capitalize the business. Did you bootstrap or raise? Eyal Feder-Levy (08:01) So we raised five different rounds since...