A new Seattle-based startup called Avante confirmed that it raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Fuse Venture Partners, saying it’s building a company with ambitions to “improve the lives of millions.”
Kabir Shahani, a serial entrepreneur who was CEO of Seattle-based marketing tech startup Amperity before exiting without public explanation two years ago, is Avante’s executive chairman.
The company’s founding team also includes Rohan D’Souza, CEO, former chief product officer for health care automation company Olive AI; and epidemiologist Carly Eckert, MD, Ph.D., Avante’s head of product and data science, who was executive vice president at Olive AI, which shut down last year after selling its key business units.
Kellan Carter, managing director at Fuse, will join the Avante board of directors. Funding also came from Ascend.vc, HighSage Ventures, and angel investors, according to the company.
Avante currently describes itself as stealth, and executives aren’t yet providing specifics about their plans. D’Souza and Shahani did not respond to requests for interviews, referring GeekWire’s inquiries to an external PR rep.
The company’s registration filing with the Washington state Secretary of State Corporations Division, dated Sept. 29, 2023, lists its formal name as Avante Health Inc., and describes its business as an “employee intelligence platform.”
Avante’s jobs page, which currently lists openings for a founding data scientist and UX designer, says it’s seeking candidates to help build a company that “empowers healthier workforces.”
The job posts say Avante is pursuing “a $1 trillion+ dollar market,” seeking to “solve a problem that plagues almost every company and every individual in America,” leveraging artificial intelligence and other technologies.
Three engineering job posts visible earlier this week went further in their description, saying the company is focused on “improving employee wellbeing through advanced analytics and behavior change.” Those posts and that language were no longer among the company’s public job listings as of Friday morning.
In a press release provided by the company, D’Souza said the company has “spent the last several months talking to customers and stakeholders who would stand to benefit from what we’re doing and see a significant opportunity to improve the lives of millions, while making a massive economic impact for our customers.”
Avante’s head of engineering is Nick Cecil, a former Salesforce director of software engineering who worked previously at Seattle-area companies Tableau, Yapta, and WildTangent.
“We’ve built a solid core team led by Nick Cecil as our head of engineering and have been very pleased with the progress we’ve made,” D’Souza said in the press release. “We plan to recruit top talent and expect to quadruple our core development team in the next 12 months.”
The funding round of $10 million is unusually large at the seed stage. It comes amid a tight market for startup funding overall in Seattle and other major tech hubs, with many angel investors and venture capitalists currently focusing their investments mostly on established companies and proven entrepreneurs.
Carter, the Fuse managing director, is quoted in Avante’s press release as saying, “We made our decision to fund Avante for three reasons: Avante’s spot-on assessment of the issue, its technical approach and the strength and experience of Rohan D’Souza, Kabir Shahani and the early team.”
Shahani’s exit as Amperity CEO and board member in February 2022 came seven months after Amperity was valued at more than $1 billion in a $100 million funding round, reaching elite “unicorn” startup status at the time. Like many other large tech startups, Amperity has since gone through multiple rounds of layoffs.
Shahani co-founded Amperity in 2016 with CTO Derek Slager, who continues to serve in that role. The two entrepreneurs previously co-founded Appature, a health marketing startup that sold to IMS Health in 2013.
