Avante raises a $30M Series A led by Frist Cressey Ventures
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Summary
October 27, 2026
Today we're announcing a $30 million Series A led by Frist Cressey Ventures, with new investors Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures, and Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund, and our existing investor FUSE. It brings our total funding to $40 million.
The money matters less than who it's for.
The team nobody built software for
At every large company, a small team makes decisions that shape the health, finances, and wellbeing of every employee and their family. In the U.S. alone, benefits teams oversee about $2 trillion a year. Globally, it's $5 trillion. When something goes wrong, like a denied claim, a sick child, or a coverage gap discovered too late, they're the first call. When things go right, almost no one mentions them.
They do this work across dozens of vendors, thousands of pages of plan documents, and rules that change by state and by country, mostly with spreadsheets, email, and PDFs. This year it got harder. Large employers are projecting a median 9.2% increase in health care costs for 2027, and benefits teams are expected to absorb it without cutting what employees rely on. Right now, many of them are doing that in the middle of open enrollment.
Our team brings together three worlds: technology, health care, and benefits. Some of us spent our careers building data and AI systems for health systems and insurers, on some of the largest and most complex healthcare infrastructure projects. Countless billions went into that work. Almost none of it reached the employer. The people deciding how one of a company's largest investments gets spent are still working in the dark, with antiquated systems and severely restricted budgets. It takes that mix of perspectives to close the gap, and closing it is why we started Avante.
What we believe
For a long time, benefits work couldn't be automated. Plan documents are written by third parties, packed with nested eligibility rules, and often contradict each other. Legacy software couldn’t address the ongoing burden of employees who didn’t understand their benefits and the program design, financial stewardship, vendor negotiations, and communications that make up the benefits leader's job.
Enter AI. AI opens up a new era where benefits can finally get software designed for its work. AI can make sense of complex documents and have two-way dialogues with employees, just like a benefits expert does. It can read and draft email, keep track of deadlines, start tasks without being asked, and reason across contracts and claims, so benefits leaders can finally get ahead.
However, not all AI is up to the task.
A top broker fed a general-purpose AI with plan documents and told us that 40% of responses contained hallucinations. A wrong answer isn't an inconvenience. It costs an employee money or care, and it puts the company at legal and fiduciary risk. Without proper guardrails, AI is over-eager, responding, producing work and making recommendations when it shouldn’t. And without context, it misses critical opportunities: to surface benefits employees aren’t asking about, to find cost savings no one knows to look for, and to identify missing documents or inconsistencies that only a benefits expert (or AI trained as one) would notice.
AI built for a specific domain is almost limitless. We've watched purpose-built solutions change legal, accounting, and finance work in just a few years. Benefits is next. Avante is the enterprise AI platform for benefits teams.
How we build for true leverage.
Instead of generic AI assistants, we are building opinionated agents designed specifically for critical benefits work. These agents give benefits leaders real leverage—handling the operational busywork, complex document analysis, and long tail of repetitive tasks that consume valuable time. Leaders can train, coach, deploy, and work alongside AI agents that operate as force multipliers, freeing teams to focus on strategy and take complete control of their company's investment.
We also believe that a single front door to health, wealth, and benefits will never exist. Employees ask questions in Slack, Teams, email, ServiceNow, and HR portals, while every vendor ships its own standalone app. Avante works behind the systems companies already run and connects existing workflows, providing human-governed, AI-operated infrastructure with seamless handoffs and continuous context.
What it looks like
Take a vendor renewal. A benefits team usually spends weeks pulling contracts, claims, and utilization reports together. With Avante, agents compare what the vendor promised with what actually happened. They show what the company spends and how employees use the benefit, country by country, and the analysis is ready before the meeting. The team negotiates better terms without cutting what employees rely on.
Employees feel it too. At Samsung Semiconductor, 66% more employees and dependents found and used mental health support that was already in their plan. At Real Chemistry, 83% of the U.S. workforce engages with Avante.
In the 18 months since launch, we've grown to more than 70 customers, including several Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. We've signed nearly five times as many customers as a year ago, and every customer that has come up for renewal has renewed. We've partnered with leading advisors and brokerages, including Gallagher, OneDigital, Segal Benz, Howden, and USI Insurance Services. And last week, we launched the beta of Ava Agents, which take on recurring benefits work and return finished outputs for teams to review.
What's next
Avante now supports more than 385,000 employees and family members, up from zero eighteen months ago. That's real progress. It's also a small fraction of the roughly 180 million Americans who get benefits through work, and far more worldwide. Our goal is to put this technology in the hands of more than 100 million people, and this round is the fuel.
It goes to three places. We're doubling down on our global strategy, so multinational teams see their whole program in one view. We're putting agents across the full benefits lifecycle, watching the program continuously and flagging issues before they become problems. And we're building the agentic infrastructure the benefits ecosystem has never had. Employers, advisors, vendors, and employees each work from their own systems and their own version of the facts. Our agents work across all of them, so the whole ecosystem can come into equilibrium, with AI at the center.
Thank you to the benefits leaders who trusted us early, to our partners and investors, and above all to the Avante team. Benefits has run on firefighting for decades. We're building the version where teams see problems early, decide with real data, and spend their time on work that needs human judgment. Modern benefits teams run on Avante.
If you lead benefits, we'd love to show you what's possible. If you want to help build it, we're hiring.
Related content
Case Study
How Samsung’s benefits team became AI-native
Challenge
A benefits program running on disconnected data
Samsung Semiconductor’s benefits team was running a multi-million-dollar program, but their data couldn’t tell them whether it was working the way they intended, or help them shape strategy and make the case for change to leadership. Claims, Rx, dental, vision, point solution, and wellness data all arrived directly from vendors, each source on its own, never reconciled, leaving the team no way to reason across them.
The pressure came to a head at renewal. Samsung’s point solution contracts were all up at once, and the performance guarantees underneath them rested on each vendor’s own anticipated ROI, quantified largely from employee attestations rather than objective data. Sarah Schutzberger, Samsung Semiconductor’s Benefits and Wellness Sr. Manager, who is responsible for the entire program, wanted to stop relying on fragmented information and tie every point solution back to actual claims. At the same time, with the team scaling for growth and employees increasingly expecting AI-grade speed, she wanted to modernize the employee experience too.
“Everything before Ava was fragmented. We relied a lot on the data being provided directly to us from our vendors. Now we’re able to connect the dots between each of our benefits to truly understand the employee impact.”
Sarah Schutzberger
Benefits and HR Operations Sr Manager, Samsung
Solution
Two agents, one connected platform
Samsung Semiconductor deployed Avante’s AI-native benefits intelligence platform. It securely brings together claims and eligibility, point solution data, plan documents, and the vendor contracts behind them into the Vault, and two purpose-built AI agents sit on top of that shared foundation. For most benefits teams, those sources never connect. With Avante, they do.
Ava
Ava, the agent for the benefits team, reasons over all of it, reconciling vendor contracts and reports against the actual claims on demand. It can generate reports and build branded presentations. The team can bring its own data too, uploading spreadsheets, PDFs, and files into a conversation. It acts like an expert benefits teammate that knows the company, its programs, and its goals, and delivers objective, near real-time insights when they’re needed. “I was looking for a data warehouse,” said Sarah, “and this is so much better. Instead of static dashboards or sending requests to an analyst, I have real-time insights at my fingertips on any question I have.”
Screens are illustrative. Names and data shown are fictional to protect user privacy.
Carly
Carly, the agent for employees, gives Samsung’s workforce real-time, accurate answers to benefits questions, and prompts the right next step rather than answering only the literal question. It helps employees find and use benefits they did not even know they had, at the exact moments they need them most.
Screens are illustrative. Names and data shown are fictional to protect user privacy.
Together, the two agents give the entire company a complete picture of its own benefits, making the use cases below possible for the first time.
Results
What the team does with Ava
The use cases are virtually endless, from building reports to making the case for new programs, from developing customized communications to pressure-testing plan redesign decisions. These are just a few the team acted on in its first three months with Ava.
Use case 1: 66% increase in Lyra utilization
Lyra had traction, with strong engagement and a high share of employees in care relative to its book of business. But when the team dug into behavioral health using Ava, they were able to compare utilization across Lyra and the medical plan, the EAP and the carrier, two datasets that almost never get connected. They surfaced a gap they could not have seen before: a large share of dependents, especially children, were routing through the medical plan for behavioral health instead of starting with Lyra, where the team wants people to begin. The stakes are meaningful: care comes in on day one through Lyra, versus waits of two weeks or more through the medical plan.
The team used Ava to draft communications for that exact parent-and-dependent population, timed to Mental Health Awareness Month, and sent them that week. They also took the finding back to Lyra so it could sharpen its own outreach, and opened a conversation with the medical plan provider about surfacing Lyra first inside the portal. The result: from the first communications in May through the end of June, engagement with the dependent population improved and utilization increased 66%.
“It was a ten-minute chat with Ava that gave us key insights, so we could make targeted communications and address the exact gap instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall and sending out marketing materials that weren’t necessarily hitting.”
Cara Ayala, RD, CPT, CHC
Wellness and Benefits, Associate Manager, Samsung
Use case 2: Making the case for healthier food options
As dietitians, Sarah and Cara had wanted to address nutrition through the company café for years, and the project kept getting pushed aside. Working from the claims data, they pulled the disease states most influenced by nutrition, gave Ava their clinical guidance (whole-foods-first, plant-forward, lean proteins, healthy fats, and a simple green/yellow/red system employees could follow), and used Ava to produce an evidence-based meal program.
The café team now plans to use this framework during the current RFP process to ensure the new vendor is able to execute successfully. Additionally, the team will track the changes in their food program along with medical claims to see the impact. A project that had waited years came together in a single 2-hour planning session.
“Revamping our cafe and food options has been a passion project of ours, but it’s a project that gets pushed to the wayside year after year. But with Ava, it is now possible to move forward.”
Cara Ayala, RD, CPT, CHC
Wellness and Benefits, Associate Manager, Samsung
Use case 3: Building an airtight sabbatical program ROI proposal
Hortencia Alcazar, the Senior Benefits Analyst at Samsung Semiconductor, had built a sabbatical analysis by hand about two years ago. It took two to three weeks of research, formatting, and modeling. She rebuilt it this year with Ava, and it came together in a few hours. Ava pulled in turnover, mental health burnout claims, replacement cost, and tenure assumptions to model ROI at different vesting points, then packaged the work as an executive summary and slides ready for leadership. What stuck with Hortencia and the team was that when they tried to trick it with the data, it held its logic and double-checked them, reasoning exactly as they would have. The proposal is now slated for Samsung’s 2027 program.
“I’d classify Ava as a thought partner and an analyzer.”
Hortencia Alcazar
Senior Benefits Analyst, Samsung
Endless possibilities for AI-native teams
In addition to the use cases above, the team:
- Built a custom manager support guide for mental health crises in minutes by combining Samsung’s own mental health crisis-response document with materials from Lyra
- Assessed whether their preventative care solution was reducing cardiovascular disease and diabetes and found low engagement among comorbid members who need it most, driving targeted communications
- Explored redesigning the medical plan for next year, including options such as a migration from the OAP to an HDHP, which will inform future negotiations
- and more…
Results
What Carly does for employees
Before Carly, an employee who wrote to the shared service center could wait more than 48 hours for a reply, and often got an answer to only the exact question they had asked. Carly answers in real time, meeting the employee where they are with personalized guidance. 16% of questions come in after hours, when the benefits team isn’t available, meeting an employee at the exact moment they need support.
It also prompts the right next step. For example, when an employee asks about mental health coverage under the medical plan, Carly also points them to Lyra, the path the team wants people to take first. Every employee question becomes a chance to drive awareness of the benefit they should be using, at the moment they need it. In the last four months alone (February – May), Carly instantly and accurately answered over 1,500 employee questions, saving the benefits team approximately 930 hours.
Open enrollment, when question volume is highest, was a key point in the year to prove Carly’s efficacy and impact. According to Sarah Schutzberger, “It was the smoothest open enrollment we’ve ever had. The amount of time it saved our team was extraordinary.”
“Avante is transforming our employees’ experience, is giving our benefits team time back, and has yielded insights resulting in impactful interventions, which are having a positive impact on the health and wellbeing of our team.”
Kevin O’Connell
Senior Director, Total Rewards & HR Operations, Samsung
Screens are illustrative. Names and data shown are fictional to protect user privacy.
How the work itself changed
With Carly fielding the day-to-day employee questions, the team reclaimed the hours it once lost to repetitive inbox support and redirected them to strategy and program development.
The team spends that reclaimed time with Ava, now its first stop for any question, communication, or decision. They use Ava to answer real-time questions in a standing Friday meeting with leadership and bring it to events to pressure-test ideas on the spot.
Ava gives them more strategic insight, faster, and it’s backed by data they trust. In its first few months, the team reclaimed hundreds of hours using Ava to build leadership and employee-facing deliverables and run dozens of cross-source claims analyses that used to take weeks by hand, or days waiting on vendors. That level of visibility and ownership also changes what gets approved. Walking into leadership with the data and the reasoning behind a recommendation moves more initiatives forward, and gives the team the confidence to put program and plan redesign recommendations on the table.
“It’s easier to push things through leadership when you have the data and the why behind the strategy.”
Sarah Schutzberger
Benefits and HR Operations Sr Manager, Samsung
“I don’t know what I did before Ava.”
Cara Ayala, RD, CPT, CHC
Wellness and Benefits, Associate Manager, Samsung
Look ahead
For Samsung, these are the early innings. On the roadmap: bringing their own drug-utilization data to PBM negotiations; connecting LOA, short-term disability, Lyra, and medical claims to forecast and prevent leaves; and next year’s medical plan design.
Benefits clarity for employees and HR
Samsung Semiconductor runs a generous benefits program, including several point solutions, focused on emotional, social, financial, and physical health and wellness for their employees and dependents.
“If you don’t have AI on your benefits team, you’re already behind. Especially in our industry, our employees are so used to using AI in everything they do, from coding to drafting. It’s everywhere. If we don’t have it, how can we stay aligned with the technology and the experience they’re already used to?”