The partnership started as a setup. LeCaire met his co-founder and CTO, Ben Cohen, through a founder speed-dating activity at Fractal Software, a New York incubator that pairs operators the way other people swipe on apps. The chemistry was not random. Cohen had grown up watching his father, a self-employed general contractor, wrestle permits out of local governments. LeCaire had watched the same dysfunction from the inside of campaigns and the Senate. Two angles on one broken thing.
Their first instinct was narrow: automate building permits. Then they did something most startups skip. Before building, they picked up the phone and called hundreds of municipalities to ask a blunt question - do you actually like the software you are paying thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars for every year? The answer, overwhelmingly, was no. And the dislike was not limited to permits. It spread across every workflow a small government touches. So they widened the lens from a single use case to a general operating system for local government.
The proof came before the product. GovWell lined up five government customers while the software was still mostly promise. By the time it launched in April 2023, it was already working with real agencies - parks departments, health departments - across multiple states. More than 60% of the founding team had previously worked for or with government. This was not a group of outsiders trying to disrupt a sector they had read about. It was insiders who had felt the friction in their own jobs.