The US has more than 90,000 local governments. Together they spend roughly $1.8 trillion per year on essential services, much of it running on software that, in many cases, hasn't meaningfully changed since the early 2000s. Permitting, licensing, code enforcement, planning and zoning: these are the processes that determine whether a house gets built, a business opens its doors, a fire safety inspection happens on time. They are the foundations of civic life, and the operating system it runs on is from a different era.

The dominant players in this space, Tyler Technologies, Accela, and OpenGov, are platforms built during a time when on-premise deployments and monolithic architectures were the norm. Shockingly (or not), many municipalities still operate on paper-based systems or use software so rigid that any configuration change requires consultants and months-long timelines.

The result is a perverse irony: the institutions tasked with enabling community development are themselves constrained by the tools meant to help them do it.

The trust deficit

Bad government software creates inefficiency for municipal employees and ultimately erodes trust between communities and the institutions that serve them.

When a contractor waits six weeks for a building permit that should take six days, they blame the government. When a resident can't figure out how to report a code violation online and gives up, their frustration lands on city hall. When a small business owner needs to renew a license but the system only works during office hours and requires an in-person visit, constituents think the government doesn't respect their time.

The trust deficit is real and measurable. Pew has been tracking trust in the federal government since 1958, when it sat at 73%; today it's at 17%. Local government tends to fare better in surveys, but the same downward pressure shows up in declining civic participation, in the difficulty municipalities face recruiting and retaining staff, and in the adversarial dynamic that develops between communities and the agencies meant to serve them. This pain also lies with the municipal employees stuck using these systems who are just as frustrated as the residents.

There's a defining constraint at the core of this market that explains why it's been so resistant to innovation: every government runs its processes differently. The building permit workflow in one Indiana town can look different from the town next door, and wholly different from one in a California county. Zoning codes, fee structures, and approval chains are all locally defined and locally enforced. This means any software that wants to serve this market needs to be deeply configurable without being custom-built. Most legacy vendors solved this problem with professional services: send consultants, build custom implementations, charge accordingly. The result are implementations that often run 12-18 months and cost multiples of the software itself. Small and mid-size municipalities, who arguably are the ones who need modern tech the most, get effectively priced out.

What GovWell built

Troy LeCaire saw the reliance on outdated software firsthand while working in the U.S. Senate. Ben Cohen lived the other side of the same problem, helping his father navigate the contractor's experience of municipal bureaucracy. When they connected and started talking to hundreds of municipalities, they saw a pattern of universal pain with a high willingness to change amongst inadequate existing options.

The GovWell platform covers the core workflows that touch citizens' lives most directly, such as permitting, licensing, planning and zoning, and code enforcement, on top of its AI operating system.

For the residents, contractors, and business owners, their AI Community Assistant gives instant, 24/7 answers to questions about zoning, trash pickup, and other municipal services, while reducing the phone and email burden on staff.

For municipal staff, it means a modern workspace where complex processes can be completed up to 95% faster than with legacy tools. AI AutoCheck reviews any applications for errors and code compliance issues, catching problems early that would otherwise bounce back and forth between applicants and reviewers for weeks.

AI allows GovWell to be more configurable and adapt faster to different government needs. Despite differences in permit, zone, and code regulations across municipalities, the core of them are the same = extremely structured and well documented data. That is the foundation upon which AI is designed to perform best.

GovWell now powers 5,000+ mission-critical government processes across agencies in 35+ states. Implementations that take legacy vendors 12–18 months are going live on GovWell in weeks. Hampton, Georgia's community development director told her city council that business license processing went from 10 days to under an hour. Nederland, Texas's code enforcement officer said that before GovWell, his stress level was "through the roof," and within the first week of using it, he noticed the difference.

New funding to modernize local government

We're excited to have Insight Partners join us in this journey of rebuilding the operating system of local government by leading GovWell's $25M Series A, with participation from Bienville Capital and a group of GovTech operators including David Reeves (former President and CRO of OpenGov), Andreas Huber (Founder and CEO of First Due), and Chris Bullock (Founder and former CEO of ClearGov). We're also excited to double down in this round after having led their seed back in 2024.

Troy and Ben genuinely believe that how government works matters, and that the people who dedicate their careers to public service deserve tools as good as the ones in the private sector. The future we're betting on is one where interacting with your local government feels as intuitive as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. We couldn't be more excited to continue this journey with Troy, Ben, and the entire GovWell team.

Read more on the GovWell blog.