Why we built an AI-native benefits platform from scratch

Hi, I'm Rohan, the CEO and co-founder of Avante.

One year ago, launching this company was one of the scariest things I'd ever done. We had a bold thesis and a small team, and we were betting that the most powerful technology ever created could finally solve a problem that had stumped the industry for decades: employers spending billions on benefits that employees don't understand, can't navigate, and rarely use to their full potential. And on the employer side, HR teams making consequential decisions about those investments with almost no signal on what's actually working.

AI-Native Advantage

We'd been working in stealth for a year, and we used the fact that we were building from scratch to our full advantage. There was no legacy platform to retrofit with AI. We built an AI-native intelligence platform, purpose-built for benefits, from day one. Not because it was easier. Because nothing less would work.

Learnings

Not every experiment we ran worked. Some failed. But the customers who stayed with us, who pushed us, who told us the hard truths, they shaped everything you're going to see this week.

Preview of the Week

And we'll dive into three areas:

• Content: SPDs, formularies, carrier contracts, plan guides. The industry's answer has been massive structured databases, months to configure, armies of people to maintain. We took a fundamentally different approach: a patent-pending ingestion pipeline that reads and understands these documents directly. That's the foundation everything else is built on.
• We then move on to context: The platform also ingests your enrollment data, your claims information, your benefits philosophy, your HR priorities. It builds a contextual layer that captures how your organization actually works, and delivers that intelligence in the tools your teams already use. Context is what makes intelligence actually useful, and how Avante becomes a true extension of your team.
• And finally, capabilities: Carly for employees, Ava for HR. Over the past year, we've made both significantly faster, smarter, and more powerful. Carly can guide an employee through a plan comparison informed by their life circumstances and surface point solutions they didn't know existed. Ava can build analyst-grade reports in minutes and run ROI analyses that used to take weeks. One platform, two agents, no limits on what you can ask or what they can build for you.

The result is an intelligence platform that helps employers finally see what's really working, and helps employees use their benefits to their full potential.

We're super proud of it, and we can't wait to show you what's inside.

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