Doubling down on Avantos: Building the AI operating system for financial services

Over the years, through conversations with wealth managers from our investments in United Capital (acquired by Goldman Sachs) and Farther Finance, we’ve heard the same recurring problem: onboarding and servicing clients is fundamentally broken.

The stories are remarkably consistent — an advisor lands a new client after months of relationship building, then comes weeks of paperwork scattered across disconnected systems, endless back-and-forth with operations teams, and manual data entry into legacy platforms. What should take days stretches into weeks. The exciting moment of winning a new client turns into an administrative slog that delays revenue, frustrates customers, and burns out teams.

This operational burden doesn't end at onboarding. Every subsequent interaction, from changing a beneficiary to adjusting portfolio allocations to processing a distribution, requires the same manual choreography. It's expensive, slow, and prevents firms from scaling personalized service. When we first invested in their seed round, Co-founders Bassam Chaptini and Rabih Ramadi walked us through their vision for Avantos — and we immediately understood what they were building and why it mattered.

The right team for the problem

Bassam and Rabih are second-time enterprise software founders who have spent their careers building platforms for the world’s largest financial institutions. Bassam holds a PhD in AI from MIT and spent a decade as a McKinsey partner in financial services. Rabih spent 15 years as a KPMG partner, serving as lead partner for Goldman Sachs and advising major broker-dealers and wealth platforms; he holds an engineering degree from Cornell University and an MBA from The Wharton School.

Across their careers working with major financial institutions, Bassam and Rabih saw a consistent pattern: client servicing remained one of the most consequential yet structurally underserved challenges in financial services.

Their insight: financial institutions don't need better task management tools or enhanced CRMs; they need an entirely new operating system that treats client onboarding and servicing as a first-class problem.

An AI-native operating system

Avantos is built on a knowledge graph that connects client data, products, teams, and work into a single, continuously updated system of context. AI agents participate directly in workflows: preparing onboarding, coordinating across teams, identifying opportunities, monitoring progress, and executing work across systems. Humans stay in control, but they're freed from navigating systems and moving data between platforms.

The impact is dramatic. What used to require logging into several different systems, copying data manually, and coordinating across multiple teams now happens through a single interface that understands the client’s full context, their products, and their needs. Avantos first launched with Mercer Advisors, a now $96 billion AUM RIA, and has since validated the approach with enterprises such as strategic investors Guardian Life, SEI, and Vanguard.

Why now?

Three forces are converging to make this the right moment for Avantos:

• AI capabilities have reached an inflection point. The knowledge graph and orchestration layer Avantos has built can now power genuinely intelligent agents that reason across complex relationships and take meaningful action.
• Client expectations have fundamentally shifted. After experiencing seamless digital experiences in every other part of their lives, clients are no longer willing to tolerate weeks-long onboarding processes or multiple phone calls to complete simple servicing requests.
• Financial institutions are finally ready to rethink core operations. The pain of legacy systems has reached a breaking point, and firms recognize that incremental improvements won't solve it.

The path forward: Agentic-driven operational efficiency

Avantos’ journey begins in wealth management, but the opportunity extends far beyond. Insurance, banking, asset management—anywhere there's complex client onboarding and ongoing servicing—face the same fundamental challenges. With this Series A funding, Avantos is building the foundational platform and AI capabilities to become the operating system for client management across all financial services.

We're thrilled to lead this round, joining existing investors E14, M13, Mercer Advisors, and Blue Collective, and to partner with Bassam, Rabih, and the entire Avantos team as they build the next generation of client management. If you're a financial institution drowning in operational complexity, or an advisor who wishes your systems worked for you instead of against you, we'd love to connect you with the team at Avantos.