Avante, a Seattle company that sells AI software to corporate benefits teams, raised a $30 million Series A led by Frist Cressey Ventures, CEO Rohan D'Souza announced on October 27. New investors Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures and Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund joined, along with existing backer FUSE.
The Avante funding takes its total to $40 million, 18 months after the product's public launch. The company said it has “signed nearly five times as many customers as a year ago,” and that all customers that reached renewal have renewed.
D'Souza wrote in the announcement that general-purpose AI is not up to benefits work, where errors fall on employees and employers. “A wrong answer isn’t an inconvenience. It costs an employee money or care, and it puts the company at legal and fiduciary risk,” he said.
What Avante's software does
Avante sells two agents that work from the same picture of an employer's benefits program. Ava is built for the benefits team: it reads plan documents, vendor contracts and claims data, checks what vendors promised against what happened, and produces reports. Carly answers employees' questions about their own coverage, in more than 80 languages.
On October 22 the company opened a beta of Ava Agents, which handle recurring benefits tasks in the background and hand the results to the team for review.
Customers include Samsung Semiconductor, Real Chemistry, Zscaler and News Corp, according to Avante's customer page. Avante said 66% more employees and dependents at Samsung Semiconductor took up mental health support that was already part of their plan. The company said it also partners with brokers and advisers including Gallagher, OneDigital, Segal Benz, Howden and USI Insurance Services.
Why Frist Cressey led
Frist Cressey Ventures, a Nashville venture firm, explained its bet in a post of its own by principal Derek Dedeker and senior associate William Trapnell. Part of the case was the founder.
We first met Rohan D’Souza three years ago, and we’ve been waiting for the chance to back him ever since.Derek Dedeker and William Trapnell, Frist Cressey Ventures
The post also made a market argument. Dedeker and Trapnell wrote that health benefits are the largest expense for most employers after wages, yet most benefits leaders cannot clearly see how that money is spent or which benefits their people use.
What the money is for
D'Souza said the round pays for three things: international growth, giving multinational employers one view of their benefits across countries; agents that cover the whole benefits cycle and monitor programs continuously to catch problems early; and agent software that works across the separate systems that employers, advisers, vendors and employees each use.
Funding history
Avante began development in the fall of 2023 and raised a $10 million seed round led by FUSE in January 2024, with Ascend Venture Capital and Highsage participating. The Series A is three times the size of the seed, and the two rounds make up the $40 million total.
D'Souza and co-founder Carly Eckert, a physician and epidemiologist, both worked at Olive AI and KenSci before Avante. Co-founder Kabir Shahani, who founded the customer data company Amperity, is executive chairman.
