Cities2gether: Turning Global Policy Knowledge Into Local Action
Around the world, mayors and city leaders face a paradox: they are expected to solve 21st-century problems using tools designed for the 20th. Congestion, climate adaptation, air quality, waste management, migration flows, and the growing housing crisis are no longer local issues; they are global patterns repeating across geographies. Yet the knowledge needed to solve these issues remains scattered, inaccessible, and difficult to translate into practice.
The paradox is stark: Cities today don’t lack solutions, they lack shared access to them. The solutions to today’s urban problems already exist. They are simply unevenly distributed.
While cities face similar realities, they work in isolation. A coastal town in South Asia confronts rising sea levels much like Rotterdam. Traffic congestion frustrates commuters in Latin America just as it does in Cairo or Milan. Air pollution, waste management, and food insecurity are not just local headaches, they are all shared global struggles.
Cities2gether AI was founded with a simple belief: Cities should not have to solve problems alone when the answers already exist in another city. The world is entering a moment where cities are playing diplomatic and global roles. They sign climate agreements, collaborate on sustainability frameworks, and negotiate internationally on housing and resilience. Yet their research capacity remains disparate, favoring large, wealthy capitals over smaller or low-income municipalities. That inequity is not technological: it is informational. ‘Policy intelligence has never been democratized.’
A Vision for Equitable Policy Innovation
Every city, no matter its size, geography, or budget deserves the chance to learn from what already works elsewhere. Yet policymaking often unfolds in isolation, slowed down by fragmented information and outdated research methods. Cities2gether emerged from a simple observation shared by practitioners across continents: while urban challenges are global, access to proven policy intelligence is not.
Registered in India and the United States, Cities2gether is building a domain-focused policy intelligence platform powered by a proprietary large language model designed specifically for public governance. Their Policy LLM reimagines how officials gather evidence, compare global approaches, and accelerate decision-making. Instead of searching through static reports or commissioning lengthy studies, policymakers can now ask direct questions and receive concise, verified insights drawn from municipal policies around the world. What once required months of research can now surface in seconds.
Behind the platform is a team whose collective experience mirrors the international nature of the cities they aim to serve.
Achyut Shankar, the CEO, brings more than a decade of work at the intersection of international trade, economic policy, and public–private dialogue. His experience at EY and the Confederation of Indian Industry, including facilitating government–industry engagement with the USA and Canada, has shaped his understanding of how policy translates into real-world impact.
Diogo Sie Lima, Director and Co-founder, contributes a cross-continental perspective shaped by work in Brazil and Europe. His background in public research, governance, and civic engagement grounds the platform in an inclusive and globally minded understanding of urban realities, ensuring policy insights are not only accurate but contextualized.
Nitin Awasthi, CTO, is a serial entrepreneur who helped launch India’s first startup studio, supporting more than 30 ventures across fintech, healthtech, and govtech. He leads the development of scalable, cloud-based tools that meet the operational needs of public-sector institutions.
Their shared motivation comes from lived experience. Each has encountered the barriers that slow policy development: unstructured research, inaccessible knowledge, and the absence of real-time benchmarking. This alignment gives their work both credibility and urgency and it explains why their prototype has already gained traction across regions.
Today, Cities2gether has a working AI prototype indexing policies from multiple global cities and offering a simple chat interface for evidence-based exploration. Early engagements are underway with municipal bodies in South Asia and Latin America, supported by Alliance of European Mayors. Workshops with policy professionals continue to reaffirm a clear need: fast, trustworthy, globally sourced insights that help cities act with confidence.
At its core, Cities2gether is built on the belief that the future of urban innovation lies in shared intelligence rather than isolated experimentation. When cities can see what worked elsewhere or what didn’t, they gain the clarity to move faster, design better policies, and build more inclusive futures. Urban progress accelerates when knowledge flows freely.
And when cities learn together, they grow stronger-2gether.
