He spent a decade watching banks own a mountain of client data and fail to connect a single dot. Then he built the machine that does.
The founder who reads a spreadsheet the way most people read a novel - for the story hiding between the cells.
Bassam Chaptini runs Avantos, a New York company with a large ambition and a plain description: it wants to be the operating system for the next generation of client management in financial services. Most fintech pitches promise a better dashboard. Chaptini is not interested in the dashboard. He is interested in the layer underneath it - the shared brain that dashboards forget to build.
Avantos is an AI-native operating system. Strip away the category language and here is what it actually does: it ties together the data a bank or wealth manager already owns - scattered across custodians, CRMs, portfolio tools, underwriting systems, policy administration platforms - into a single knowledge graph. Then it sets AI agents loose inside the workflows themselves. Onboarding. Servicing. The quiet, unglamorous coordination that decides whether a client stays or leaves.
The insight is almost annoyingly simple, which is usually the sign of a good one. Financial firms are not short on data. They are short on connection. "The data is often either in people's heads or it's siloed in different ways," Chaptini says. The agents, he explains, "sit now on this shared system of context" - each one carrying the same understanding of what is happening and what needs to be done.
With the advent of AI, Rabih and I jumped on the occasion and said, 'there's a new way of thinking about the problem.'Bassam Chaptini, on founding Avantos
Client onboarding is the part of finance that never makes the highlight reel. It is forms, checks, handoffs, and the slow leak of information between people who each hold a piece of the picture. Chaptini and co-founder Rabih Ramadi call it "one of the most consequential yet structurally underserved challenges in financial services." Consequential because it is the first impression and the recurring one. Underserved because fixing it is tedious, and tedious problems get patched, not solved.
Chaptini arrived at this conviction from the inside. He spent close to a decade as a partner at McKinsey & Company, working across financial services and digital transformation - which is a polite way of saying he was hired, again and again, to look at why big institutions could not get out of their own way. Ramadi reached the same conclusion from a different chair: fifteen years as a partner at KPMG, including the lead partner role for Goldman Sachs. Two consultants, two firms, one recurring diagnosis. When they finally compared notes, they did not build another tool to sit on top of the mess. They decided the mess needed a new operating system.
The most vivid piece of the product is also the most human. Avantos ships an AI assistant that, in Chaptini's words, "literally shadows the advisor." It handles the connective tissue of the job: meeting summaries, email drafting, account opening, service recommendations. Not a chatbot bolted to the side of the workflow, but a participant inside it - one that already knows the client, the products, and the last conversation, because it is reading from the same knowledge graph as everyone else.
That is the difference Chaptini keeps returning to. A tool waits to be asked. An agent already knows the context. When the data lives in a shared system instead of in someone's head, the software can finally do the work rather than just display it.
Founders who talk about AI operating systems are common. Founders who have actually built AI systems, and financial-services software, and shipped enterprise product, are rarer. Chaptini has done all three, in order, over many years.
He holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and an M.S. in Machine Learning from MIT, built on a Bachelor of Engineering from the American University of Beirut. That is not a resume line he picked up on the way to a startup - it is where he started. After MIT and a stint at ChoiceStream, McKinsey gave him a decade-long tour of how financial institutions really operate. Then came Unqork, the enterprise no-code platform, where he was a founding member and Chief Technology Officer. No-code was a punchline before it was a category; Chaptini helped make it serious. Avantos is his second act at rebuilding fintech's plumbing, this time with agents instead of drag-and-drop.
The AI assistant literally shadows the advisor.On how Avantos fits into the real work
In February 2026, Avantos raised a $25 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, pushing total funding to $35 million on top of a $10 million seed round from September 2024 led by the MIT-affiliated E14 Fund. The number is respectable. The names around it are the real signal.
Vanguard. SEI. The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. These are not tourist checks from crossover funds chasing an AI logo - they are the exact institutions whose operations Avantos is trying to rewire, choosing to invest in the company rather than wait to buy the product. The company launched with Mercer Advisors, a registered investment advisor running roughly $96 billion in assets. When your first customer and several of your investors are the industry you are disrupting, "product-market fit" stops being a slide and starts being a fact.
Chaptini's wager is that the winning AI companies in finance will not be the ones with the flashiest interface. They will be the ones that own the context - the shared, connected, always-current picture of the client that every agent and every human can draw from. Build that layer, and the applications on top become almost inevitable. Skip it, and you are back to a prettier dashboard reading from the same broken silos.
It is a patient thesis from a patient builder. A PhD before a startup. A decade of consulting before a founding role. Two fintech companies before this one. Chaptini has spent his whole career assembling the exact combination of skills this problem demands. Avantos is what happens when someone stops describing a hard problem and starts owning it.
The data is in people's heads, or it's siloed. The agents finally sit on a shared system of context.— Bassam Chaptini
Avantos is built as a layer, not an app. A knowledge graph does the remembering. AI agents do the work. A single interface replaces the tab-hopping that eats an advisor's day.
AI-powered onboarding that turns forms, checks, and handoffs into a guided, connected flow.
A knowledge graph linking client data, products, teams, and workflows into one shared brain.
Agents that shadow advisors - summaries, drafting, account opening, and next-best actions.