GovWell Brings Automation and Efficiency to Local Governments

Government websites aren’t exactly known for being cutting-edge. GovWell co-founder and CTO Ben Cohen discovered this while trying to help his father, a contractor, apply for building permits. Cohen worked as a full-stack engineer at Uber during the day and faxed building permits at night. The difference in technology was stark. Years later, that experience inspired him to launch GovWell.

New York-based GovWell is a workflow system for small and mid-sized governments that helps automate and streamline tasks ranging from building permits and codes to zoning and fire safety inspections. GovWell co-founder and CEO Troy LeCaire told TechCrunch that the platform helps local governments complete tasks in a fraction of the time it used to take.

LeCaire added that each government implements these processes slightly differently, so the GovWell platform is designed so that governments can customize it to their requirements without having to pay for a dedicated platform.

“It’s a single product that you can configure with no-code tools so that the software adapts perfectly to what it needs to do,” LeCaire said. “A good example is something like Salesforce—you can configure it to adapt to different companies, but under the hood it’s the same process.”

LeCaire and Cohen were matched up through a speed dating event between founders at Fractal Software, a New York startup incubator. They realized that both had government experience, Cohen with his father, and LeCaire with political campaigns and graduate degrees in the field. They initially set out to build software that would automate building permits, but quickly realized the problem was bigger.

“We called hundreds of municipalities and asked them what (software) they were using and whether they liked it, and we found that people didn’t like it, even though they had paid thousands, if not millions, for it,” LeCaire said. “We realized that government needed a more general workflow solution.”

GovWell signed up five government customers before the founders wrote a single line of code. Now, since its April 2023 launch, GovWell has partnered with more than a dozen local governments, from parks departments to health departments, in seven states.

GovWell raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Work-Bench with participation from existing investor Bienville Capital. LeCaire said the company didn’t need to raise money and is on track to becoming cash-flow positive. They decided to raise money because there was interest from inbound investors and the company had the opportunity to set its own terms to accelerate growth. GovWell will use the money to triple its team over the next 18 months and invest in product development.

GovWell isn’t the only company looking to bring government software into the 21st century. Several startups, like GovDash, Hazel, and Odo, are also looking to bring better software to the government contracting space. There are also some that focus on government workflow. One is OpenGov, a provider of cloud software for governments that raised $178 million in venture capital funding before being acquired by Cox Enterprises earlier this year. GovPilot is another.

LeCaire said that even among other software companies, there is not the kind of competition in this sector that exists in artificial intelligence or B2B SaaS software.

“The scale of the problem is enormous,” LeCaire said. “Government spending is 36% of GDP. Local governments spend $1.8 trillion to administer services. It’s a huge sector of the economy. Their adoption of AI is a huge market that touches everyone’s lives, the education system, and economic and community development.”

LeCaire said that while people don’t think of local governments as big users of new technology — which isn’t entirely wrong — this area is different because these organizations are already spending a lot of money on it. GovWell hopes to become that provider.

“Our goal is to be the number one choice for workflow automation for smaller and mid-sized local governments in the next 18 months,” LeCaire said. “What we’re doing here is unifying the idea that, hey, government should work better. We all pay taxes. We all want our government to be efficient and effective to use.”