Vizzia, a French startup providing video surveillance technology for local authorities, has raised a €30m Series B round, bringing total funding to €50m.
The company builds cameras and AI software to help local authorities detect crime and antisocial behaviour like fly-tipping, while also supporting police investigations.
Amid growing demand and ever more sophisticated technology, AI-powered video surveillance has become increasingly controversial, with digital rights organisations across Europe highlighting potential privacy risks.
Despite this, the video surveillance market is experiencing “incredible momentum”, says cofounder Katrin de Proyart, as safety rapidly becomes a priority for local authorities across Europe.
The round was led by San Francisco-based investor Base10 Partners and included participation from US VC Headline as well as French investor Sistafund.
What does Vizzia do?
Launched in 2021, Vizzia initially focused on tools to help local authorities identify illegal waste dumping. The startup deployed cameras to fly-tipping hotspots, which can issue an alert when movements are detected. Vizzia says the technology has been adopted by 250 municipalities in France.
Last year the company expanded its offering to include monitoring and detection of wider urban security issues like crime and antisocial behaviour.
The startup says its technology is particularly flexible, relying on 4G/5G cameras that don’t require fibre connectivity and can be easily deployed and moved around.
De Proyart says the product answers a growing need from local authorities. “We’ve done many studies on the relevance of video surveillance and our polls are clear: almost all political parties want access to these tools,” she says.
The sector is tightly regulated. In France, for instance, AI-powered detection in real-time is not permitted. Vizzia says its images are assessed manually by human operators and the startup’s AI software is mostly used to boost image analysis for investigations in non-real-time.
The company, however, is expanding to the UK and Italy, where regulations are different. “What we can detect is specific to the rules in place in the market,” says De Proyart.
The rise of video surveillance
The past few years have seen the sector heat up with the emergence of several startups in the field, such as Paris-based Orasio, which raised a €16m seed round last year to build AI-powered software to analyse video feeds to detect situations like someone carrying a weapon or the start of a fire.
The rules surrounding the technology are evolving too. In France, a law was passed in 2023 authorising the use of AI-powered cameras in real time for specific use cases during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. The text is now set to be expanded into 2027.
The European Union’s wide-ranging AI Act, which is currently being rolled out across the bloc in stages, also bans the use of CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases.
De Proyart stresses Vizzia is compliant “by design” and that the startup builds its products based on the laws currently in place.
What’s next for Vizzia?
Vizzia plans to double down on commercialisation thanks to the opening of offices in the UK and Italy, with the objective of onboarding a local authority every week in 2026.
The startup will invest in research and development (R&D) and significantly increase the size of its team from 100 currently to 250 by the end of the year.
