Help benefits professionals make complex purchasing decisions with more clarity.
Aelana is an early-stage company building analytical infrastructure for employee-benefits advisory. We’re starting with the renewal, because that is where the most consequential decisions get made with the least support.
Why the broker is the right place to start.
Brokers sit inside the annual decision loop. They see many employers at once, they already own the renewal motion, and they’re where the messy inputs converge — claims reports, census files, quotes, network choices, pharmacy trend, contribution strategy, stop-loss terms.
They also feel the problem most acutely. An employer runs this process once a year. A brokerage runs it dozens or hundreds of times, with the same reconstruction work each time. That concentration is why decision support belongs here first.
Employers and health plans are plausible customers later. The initial focus stays deliberately narrow.
We’re building for the broker’s seat, not competing for it.
There is a version of this company that becomes a brokerage. It would have a shorter path to revenue and a clearer story. We haven’t taken it, for a straightforward reason: a software company that also competes for your clients cannot credibly ask you to put your book inside it.
Staying on the software side of that line constrains what we can build and how we can make money. We think it’s the constraint that makes the product worth trusting.
Four things we’ve decided.
Narrow first
One job, done properly: the renewal recommendation for a middle-market employer. A platform that does nine things adequately is less useful than one that does this well.
Show the working
An analytical tool that can't explain itself is a liability in a business where recommendations get questioned. Traceability is a design constraint, not a feature we plan to add later.
Software, not services
We sell a tool to the brokerage. We don't take the account, the commission, or the advisory relationship — and we don't intend to.
Say what's true
We're pre-customer. The examples on this site are fictional and labelled as such. We'd rather be trusted than impressive.
The longer-term direction.
Benefits strategy shouldn’t begin ninety days before a renewal. Over time, the intent is that the same analytical foundation supports the rest of the year — watching cost and utilisation trends, flagging emerging risk, checking whether a strategy performed the way it was modelled to.
Further out, the more valuable idea is institutional: a brokerage accumulates real expertise, and most of it lives in individual people, old spreadsheets and past presentations. Helping a firm encode how its strongest teams evaluate a client — so that thinking applies across more accounts — is the direction we find most worth building toward.
That is a description of where we’re heading, not of what exists today.
We’re building this with the industry, in the open.
The product concept has been shaped by conversations with practising employee-benefits professionals. If you advise employers on their benefits, we’d like to hear how your team actually works — and to show you what we’re building.