Planyear, an AI-powered platform built specifically for benefits consultants, has raised $12 million in seed funding led by True Ventures. The startup is aiming to unburden brokers and consultants from repetitive documentation, comparisons, and employee Q&A by automating those tasks with its core AI system.

Founded by benefits industry veterans and technologists, Planyear has already launched its flagship product, BEACON, which ingests carrier documents, HR data, and plan details to generate clean proposals, perform benefits comparisons, and even autonomously answer a portion of employee questions (claiming around 57% of queries can be handled without human intervention).

With the new funds, Planyear plans to expand its modules (for carriers, brokers, HR), enhance integration with HRIS systems, and deepen its decisioning AI logic.

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Why the Benefits Consulting Space Is Ripe for Disruption

The benefits consulting industry, though mature, still faces high inefficiency and complexity. According to industry reports, the Benefits Consulting Service market was valued at USD 5.2 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow at ~7.0% CAGR to USD 9.1 billion by 2033. 

Meanwhile, employers themselves are demanding more from their advisors. A recent survey found 71% of employers expect their advisors to bring better insights about employee benefits preferences and behavior -  not just cost summaries. 

Within clients, benefits functions are squeezed: one industry survey showed that 36% of organizations view the costs of benefits management as a top pain point, while 21% cite under-resourced benefits staff as a core struggle.

So the opportunity is clear: brokers and consultants need tools that let them scale complexity, deliver better insights, and free time from laborious work. Planyear positions itself to be the AI core behind that upgrade.

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(Embedded Insight) The Strategic Lever Founders Often Miss

As Planyear automates document processing, employee Q&A, and proposal generation, the deeper strategic advantage isn’t just speed or cost -  it’s advisory amplification.

In domains where trust matters (benefits, healthcare, legal, finance), clients don’t just pay for accurate work -  they pay for confidence in decisions. By automating not only execution but credibility- making proposals auditable, consistent, and backed by data- Planyear is shifting from a “tool” to a decision assistant.

In high-stakes professional domains, your moat is not in doing things faster -  it’s in making clients feel safer about doing them.

When your system can reduce advisor risk (e.g. misquoting benefits, overlooking compliance, misunderstanding plan rules), it becomes not just a convenience but a necessity. Founders in regulatory or advisory verticals should ask: How much decision anxiety does my product relieve? The more risk you absorb for your users, the harder it is for them to replace you.

Planyear’s early claims -  handling 57% of employee queries automatically, generating clean proposals -  are powerful because they don’t just accelerate processes, they replace points of potential human error or second-guessing. That’s where adoption sticks -  not just in one use, but in every ongoing renewal, audit, or client review.

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Strategy, Trajectory & Risks

With the new capital, Planyear plans to:

• Expand its AI models to better understand carrier rules, plan variation, and regional compliance
  
• Build deeper integrations to HRIS, payroll, benefits administration platforms
  
• Offer modules to employers and carriers (not just brokers) for end-to-end benefits workflows
  
• Scale sales, marketing, and partnerships with broker networks
  

However, risks are real:

• Data heterogeneity & document complexity: Carrier documents, plan definitions, benefits rules vary wildly across geographies, making standardization hard.
  
• Explainability & trust: Advisors and clients will demand transparency in how the system arrives at recommendations.
  
• Adoption resistance: Benefits consultants may be conservative and skeptical of replacing parts of their workflow with AI.
  
• Margin pressure & cost scaling: Processing large documents, maintaining models, and supporting queries at scale will require efficient compute and architecture.
  

Yet Planyear’s domain focus, combined with advisor empathy in its product design, gives it a path to credibility that generalist automation tools often struggle to cross.

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Why This Raise Signals a New Phase

Planyear’s $12M seed is more than a capital infusion -  it’s a signal that investors believe the next wave of infrastructure lies in vertical AI -  systems that do heavy lifting behind human expertise in professional domains.

The benefits consulting space is not huge in public attention, but its complexity, regulatory burden, and high margins make it fertile ground for AI transformation. Planyear is betting that modernization here will ripple outward: clients saved time, better plans, and more trust.

For founders in adjacent sectors, the lesson is powerful: the richest verticals are not always the loudest. The most durable opportunities often lie underground -  in rewriting the support systems professionals already lean on.

And as Planyear builds credibility inside benefits consulting, it may extend to HR operations, compliance, wellness advisory, and beyond -  becoming the AI core platform that powers modern benefits strategy.

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