What we build
A client app under your brand
Net worth, cash, debt, goals, a Health score, and Athena AI in your firm’s voice.
Mission Control for your team
The household CRM your advisors open every morning to see who needs them.
Athena AI on both sides
Answers clients any time of day and drafts replies and summaries for your team.
Growth built in
Ads that bring prospects straight into your app, where they become clients.
Planning, investing, communication, billing, and ad tech all sit on the same household record, so there is nothing to bolt on and one place for your team to work. Your firm gets a single platform that handles the everyday work for every household — and your advisors spend their day on advice.
Athena today
Athena isn’t an experiment. Firms already run their books on it, every day, on top of Schwab.
- End-user accounts on the platform
- In assets
- Historical uptime
- AI conversations with clients
Why we started Athena
Most advice platforms were built for a book of larger relationships, where every new household brings its own share of meetings, emails, and follow-up. That model makes smaller accounts unprofitable and caps how many households a team can serve.
We built Athena so the math works for every account. The platform does the routine work for each household automatically, and your team sees only the moments that need a person. That lets your firm say yes to the young professionals, heirs, and smaller accounts that become tomorrow’s best clients — and serve them well from day one.
For RIAs
Less work. Better advice.
See how lean firms use Athena to grow a larger book of smaller accounts, under their own brand.
See Athena for RIAsOur founder
Brian Cosmano founded Athena in Austin in 2021 and leads it as chief executive. He has spent his career building advice that scales to millions of people. Connect with Brian on LinkedIn.
Investment research
Morningstar, Ibbotson Associates, and Dimensional
Chief Innovation Officer
Empower Retirement, 2015 to 2020
Originated Dual QDIA
Now a standard retirement plan default
Founded Athena
Austin, 2021
At Empower Retirement he owned product strategy for managed accounts, personalized target dates, and the experience plan participants used. In 2016 he originated the Dual QDIA in the paper In Search of a More Dynamic QDIA: younger savers start in a target-date fund, then move automatically into a managed account at a set age. Empower shipped the first product of that type, and Fidelity, Schwab, Principal, and Voya later built the same two-stage default. In 2018 he co-authored Empower Institute’s Made to Measure on how to value a managed account.
Before Empower he worked at Morningstar Investment Management, including Ibbotson Associates, and at Dimensional Fund Advisors on a personalized target-income offering. He is the sole inventor on multiple U.S. design patents for planning interfaces and a named inventor on U.S. Patent 11,748,814, a planning engine for a financial planning system. He holds a B.A. in Finance from Truman State University and an M.S. in Computer Science from DePaul University, and LIMRA named him a Rising Star Under 40.
Our advisory board
Two of the most respected names in investment research and behavioral finance advise the company.
Peng Chen, Ph.D., CFA
Former president and chief investment officer of Ibbotson Associates, then head of Morningstar’s global investment management division. Founding chief executive of Dimensional Fund Advisors’ Asia business, and a Graham and Dodd Scroll award winner.
Shlomo Benartzi
Professor emeritus of behavioral decision making at UCLA Anderson and co-founder of its Behavioral Decision-Making Group. Distinguished senior fellow at the Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative, focused on digital nudges that help people make better financial decisions.
What we believe
Every account
Every household deserves advice
The platform should make a $50,000 household as easy to serve well as a $5 million one.
Your brand
Your firm comes first
Clients see your name on the app, the chat, and every message, not ours.
Your advisors
People for the moments that matter
Athena handles the routine work, so your team spends its time on judgment and relationships.
Where we work
Athena Advisory Inc is based in Austin, Texas. The platform maintains SOC 2 Type II compliance and runs on Amazon Web Services; see Security for the details, and Integrations for how Athena connects to Schwab and the rest of your stack.
Want to see it on a book like yours? Book a demo, or get in touch for partnerships, press, and other questions.