"Being able to work with fractional consultants gives you an opportunity to get the work done that you need without having to necessarily fully commit to hiring a full-time resource."
The Problem
Background
Avantos is building an AI-native client servicing and onboarding platform for financial services, starting in the wealth management space. The company works with registered investment advisors to help them better service their clients through a unified, integrated platform.
As an early-stage startup, Avantos had limited engineering resources, and every developer was focused on the core product. When the team needed to integrate with a third-party vendor for PDF generation and DocuSign workflows, they hit a wall: the vendor's API was highly specialized, and no one on the team had experience with it.
"It's a pretty niche product," said Kevin, a Product Manager at Avantos. "It's an area that our team does not really have expertise in, particularly the vendor that we're working with, which has a very unique API, very unique sort of setup."
Hiring a full-time engineer for a specialized integration project did not make sense. But the project was too important to defer.
The Solution
Avantos learned about Fraction and saw an opportunity to fill the gap without diverting their core engineering team. Fraction placed an architect who had already built the exact integration Avantos needed.
"Working with Fraction and bringing on an expert who knew the integration, who had done the integration before, really gave us a leg up on getting started with the project," Kevin said. "And really understanding not only what we needed to do, but how we could actually integrate with this third-party vendor in order to deliver the product that we need to."
This was not Avantos's first engagement with Fraction. They had previously worked with a subject matter expert in the insurance space, making them a repeat client. In both cases, Kevin highlighted Fraction's vetting process as a key differentiator, particularly around communication skills, which matter enormously in remote, asynchronous work.
"The Fraction team does a really great job in filtering out people that are very easy to work with, easy to communicate with, which is very effective and important when you're working in a remote environment," he said. "In both experiences, the people that we were working with were really great, really easy to work with, great communicators and very knowledgeable for sure."
The Results
The Fraction engagement delivered exactly what a resource-constrained startup needed: momentum on a high-priority project without sacrificing focus on the core product.
Project Kickoff Without Trade-offs: "Given that we're a startup, all of our engineers are sort of tied up focusing on our day-one initiatives," Kevin explained. "We were able to bring in some extra help that could help kick off this project that is super important, without having to take time away from our team that is hyperfocused on their day-one initiatives."
Accelerated Understanding, Not Just Execution: The Fraction architect did not just write code. The engagement gave the Avantos team a clear understanding of the vendor's unique API and integration patterns, enabling them to continue the build independently. "Really kicking off the project is probably the biggest value that Fraction offered," Kevin said. "And now we're in a place where we're ready to just build out the rest of the implementation."
De-risked Hiring: Kevin also pointed to the broader advantage of the fractional model for startups navigating hiring uncertainty. "Hiring is always a challenge, right? Finding the right people. Not only that, but once you do hire, you don't know if they end up being the right person on the job," he said. "Being able to work with fractional consultants gives you an opportunity to get the work done that you need without having to necessarily fully commit to hiring a full-time resource."
