Athena Advisory is an Austin company that builds software for registered investment advisors.

What we build

The platform sits under the household, not beside it

Athena is one platform with two surfaces the firm lives in every week. The client app is what households and prospects open: firm-branded wellness, a Health roadmap, ranked next steps, and firm-voice Athena AI. Mission Control is the household CRM: leads, conversations, exceptions, overnight investing activity, and the record of what the client already saw. Planning, communication, investing under the investment policy, billing from the signed agreement, and ad tech that lands paid clicks from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube into the same wellness app all sit on that household record. Athena replaces a separate CRM for this book. Athena does not replace the custodian or the books and records. Diligence detail for controls and SOC 2 Type II lives on Security; the stack map lives on Integrations.

Founder

Brian Cosmano

Brian Cosmano is the founder and chief executive of Athena Advisory Inc, which he started in Austin in 2021. He is also chief compliance officer of Athena Advisory RIA, LLC. The company is bootstrapped. He works from Austin.

From 2015 to 2020 he was Chief Innovation Officer 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 Empower and Great-West Investments’ paper In Search of a More Dynamic QDIA. The paper argued that a plan did not have to pick only a target-date fund or only a managed account as its default. Younger savers could start in a target-date fund, then move automatically into a managed account at a set age, still inside the QDIA safe harbor from the Pension Protection Act of 2006. The industry now calls that structure Dual QDIA, Dynamic QDIA, or a hybrid QDIA.

Empower shipped the first product of that type, Dynamic Retirement Manager, and other recordkeepers later built the same two-stage default, including Fidelity, Schwab, Principal, and Voya. Plan consultants now treat Dual QDIA as a standard option, not a one-off. Brian’s paper is the document that named the problem and the design those products follow. In 2018 he was an author of Empower Institute’s Made to Measure, which set out how to value a retirement managed account beyond a simple return comparison to a target-date fund.

Before Empower he worked in Morningstar Investment Management, including Ibbotson Associates and advisory platform operations, 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, a named inventor on Empower planning and outcome-prediction patents, and a named inventor on U.S. Patent 11,748,814, a planning engine for a financial planning system. He has a B.A. In Finance from Truman State University and an M.S. In Computer Science from DePaul University. LIMRA named him a Rising Star Under 40.

Published numbers

These are the figures Athena publishes about the platform.

These are the numbers Athena publishes. They are not invented case-study claims, and they are not another vendor’s marketing checklist pasted here as proof.

• 500K+

  end-user accounts on the platform

• $7B+

  in assets under contract

• 99.999%

  historical uptime

• 50K+

  AI conversations with end users