Close-up of a webcam mounted on the roof of a car, with a residential street and autumn trees in the background.

what we’re
all about

We founded Placemetry in 2025 to provide the data to build better cities. Before, it was costly and time-consuming for cities to gain a comprehensive picture of their built environment, making housing assessments and code violations piece-meal and inefficient. Now with Placemetry, we provide the data to make cities livable, equitable and sustainable. Our team of urban economists, AI experts and behavioral scientists is headquartered in San Diego, CA.

PLACEMETRY

BUILDING BETTER CITIES AND ROADWAYS

We regularly drive cities and roadways across the US, capturing photos of properties and infrastructure from the public right-of-way with our vehicle-mounted cameras. We focus only on the built environment: faces are always blurred out. We feed these images into our advanced AI algorithms, which automatically identify issues with the property and infastructure, including quality and code violations.

With our data package, our clients get access to a photo and a list of issues for each property in their city. We generate a custom report with maps for comprehensive assessments and Priority Scores, which help clients focus on what matters most to them. Our clients use this data to evaluate urban progress, target clean-up and improvement efforts, or request more resources for their city.

Meet our Team

Erik Johnson

FOUNDER and CEO
Erik is a Ph.D. urban economist who dedicated his career to using AI to understand how to improve city structure and function. Before founding Placemetry, Erik was the founder, former CEO and CTO of City Detect, a start-up that mounts cameras on city vehicles to assist with code-enforcement. Erik also teaches classes on entrepreneurship and economics to MBA students at UC-San Diego, and was previously a professor of urban economics at the University of Alabama, where he pioneered the use of AI to automatically detect issues in images. Erik is leading Placemetry with a vision of providing much-needed data to cities, real estate and insurance companies, to build better cities and improve communities.
Anya Samek

COO
Anya is the COO of Placemetry and is an Associate Professor at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches MBA courses in Strategy and Economics. At Placemetry, Anya applies her expertise in behavioral science to design strategies that turn individual actions into community-wide transformation; and to evaluate the data that insurance and real estate companies need to guide their decision-making. After earning her Ph.D. in 2010, Anya went on to co-found and run the Science of Philanthropy Initiative, a $5 project that brings together academics and charities to revolutionize our understanding of philanthropy.
Nick Luerding

SALES DIRECTOR
Nick Luerding has 10+ years of experience selling technology products (SaaS) that provide data driven insights that empower provider teams to improve patient care. He’s excelled in multiple management roles—opening new logos, expanding enterprise accounts, and navigating complex, multi-stakeholder cycles across the healthcare ecosystem. After over a decade in healthcare, he’s learned firsthand how data can improve outcomes and avoid risks. That’s why he’s now focused on the next frontier of impact: leveraging AI to transform cities.