Introducing Avandar

Avandar is an end-to-end data management and program management platform. This means that Avandar can assist with any stage of your program’s data lifecycle, including integrating, processing, tracking, visualizing, analyzing, and reporting your program data. It provides a single streamlined platform for organizations to manage and interact with their program data.

Before diving deeper into the problems that we’re solving, I want to give some background about myself. My name is Pablo and I am a software engineer with a BSc in Computer Science from Cornell University and a Master in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, specializing in humanitarian health and global digital health. I have spent over a decade building software for the social sector. I have worked in corporate philanthropy teams from Big Tech companies, including Palantir’s Philanthropy team and Two Sigma’s Data Clinic, as well as serving as director of engineering at Zenysis, a public health tech startup. I’ve had the privilege to build software for over 30 nonprofits and government institutions, in over 15 countries, across 5 continents. I’ve built early warning systems, countless data integration pipelines, emergency response tools for disease epidemics, and data analytics products for humanitarian emergencies, food security, homelessness, and anti-human trafficking.

My life’s mission is the same one that I founded Avandar under: to give the social sector the tools they deserve for a more just world. I founded Avandar because I am tired of watching the majority of the tech industry pursue short-term profits delivering products that can cause harm. I am tired of watching life-saving nonprofits repurpose tools that were never designed for them, just to make their daily operations work on a shoestring budget. I am tired of the unspoken belief that software built for the social sector is subpar and that the social sector should just accept it. Avandar’s mission is to provide the social sector with affordable high quality data tools, built with the same degree of mature and innovative software engineering we expect from Big Tech, but with the needs of the social sector and the communities they serve as our top priority in every design decision we make.

I founded Avandar because I am tired of watching the majority of the tech industry pursue short-term profits delivering products that can cause harm.

Avandar is currently in its pre-launch stage, preparing for an alpha release of the product. If you are interested in becoming an early adopter, please email us at earlyadopters@avandarlabs.com. Please continue reading if you want to learn more about the problems that Avandar solves or just scroll to the end if you wanted to be an early adopter. We look forward to hearing from you!

The problems we solve

After twelve years of building software for nonprofits, I kept seeing the same two problems over and over again:

1. Organizations constantly struggle with fragmented data.
2. Organizations constantly struggle managing the resources tracked by their fragmented data.

Fragmented data

Definition
Fragmented data is when an organization’s data is distributed across too many different sources (Excel sheets, Google sheets, Postgres, Airtable, PDFs, JSONs, and even pen & paper forms).

Data fragmentation makes it impossible for a community worker, program manager, or executive to understand how a program is operating because they can never view the data they need when they need it. This problem is so significant that 90% of surveyed nonprofits said they were collecting data but nearly 50% said they didn’t actually use that data often to make decisions¹.

Data fragmentation is solved through “data integration” (or “data unification” or “data harmonization”) but this process isn’t easy. In fact, some companies, such as Palantir and Snowflake, have built multi-billion dollar businesses out of solving data integration for other companies. Some of these licenses and contracts can cost from tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Large organizations can afford these enormous expenses to integrate their data. Small organizations, with just thousands of rows, can probably manage their data fragmentation manually by copying/pasting rows across different systems. But what about middle-sized data scale? What about all those organizations with tens of thousands or tens of millions of rows, who cannot manage their data with spreadsheets anymore, but simply don’t have the funding to afford more expensive solutions? At Avandar we refer to this as the “missing middle” of data scale. These organizations with small-to-medium data scales are overlooked by high tech solutions, because focusing on Big Data is a lot more profit- and investor-friendly. This leaves the majority of the social sector repurposing data tools, that were never built with their real-world problems in mind, just to stay afloat.

Resource management

Once data is integrated, organizations then interact with and analyze this data. The data to analyze typically represents some resource that they need to manage. If you’re a doctor, that resource might be a patient, so you need a case management system. If you’re working with partners, you may need a customer relationship management (CRM) system. For grants, there are grant management systems; for donors, donor management systems.

But what about an organization’s public-facing programs? The tangible day-to-day operations of how they execute their mission?

• If you’re a local nonprofit distributing food to low-income households, what is your management system?
• If you’re an aid organization responding to a cholera epidemic by tracking contaminated water sources, what is your management system?
• If you’re an LGBTQ+ advocacy group working on sexual health education programs, what is your management system?

The upstream needs of nonprofits—HR, donors, customers—already have several available solutions. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the downstream mission-critical programs: the services that are actually reaching the communities. We have task management systems, like Asana or Monday.com, for hyper-granular task management, but yet again, we encounter a missing middle. What happens when we go one level up, and instead of managing tasks we are managing resources? How do you manage a resource (like a vaccine, health worker, client, investigation team, or workshop), instead of a task?

Perhaps the closest solution is Salesforce, a powerful customizable data management platform. However, its many licenses for different components can add up; organizations often need to also hire technical experts to set up the platform, another costly expense. If you have too much program data for a spreadsheet, but you’re not big enough to afford all the licenses or the technical expertise, what solution is left for you then? We’re back to that “missing middle.”

It’s no wonder then that 78%² to 88%³ of nonprofits lack the digital tools they need to support their mission. And without the right tools, they are 3.5x less likely to achieve their mission goals³.

How Avandar solves these problems

What differentiates Avandar from other data integration or data management solutions are two key insights from my long career of building data products for the social sector:

1. Most of the social sector does not have Big Data.
2. Program management is data management and it can be modeled as a customization problem.

Most of the social sector does not have Big Data

Definition
There are quite a few definitions of “Big Data,” which we’ll cover in other blog posts, but the simplest one is: Big Data is a volume or stream of data that cannot be processed with traditional data management tools, such as storing all the data into a single SQL database.

Big Data is often misunderstood. Is a million rows “Big Data?” What about a billion rows? The often forgotten part is that it is not a static definition. There is no objective number or threshold at which data becomes “Big.”

[There] is not a static definition. There is no objective number or threshold at which data becomes “Big.”

As computing power and databases improve, what counted as “Big” ten years ago is now easily manageable through a traditional database.

Fifteen years ago, hundreds of millions of rows may have required significant vertical scaling (increasing the capacity of your cloud infrastructure, which is incredibly expensive) and horizontal scaling (such as sharding, by splitting up your database into smaller chunks across several machines, which also significantly increases costs). Today, you can process that data in your own browser without even needing a server. Nowadays, hundreds of millions of rows is far from “Big.”

So ask yourself: does your organization handle several billions of rows? If no, then you probably do not have Big Data. If your organization handles less than a hundred million rows, you almost definitely do not have Big Data. For example, even public health problems traditionally don’t have Big Data⁴.

Unfortunately, most data platforms are still built to handle true Big Data, because the companies that actually have Big Data are also the ones willing to pay the most. In short, Big Data is still where the money is. And as a tech company, once you need to architect your product to manage Big Data, your company expenses increase significantly, which means you need to charge your users a lot more so you can still make a profit. This leaves the majority of the social sector in an unfair situation. Nonprofits often have to pay for licenses and subscriptions to products that were designed for data scales much larger than what they need, which means they are paying prices that were never meant for them in the first place. The social sector is effectively paying a tax for a data scale that they do not need.

Avandar will intentionally not support Big Data. We are building, first and foremost, for the “missing middle” of the social sector. For all those organizations with too much data to manage in a spreadsheet, but who still do not truly have Big Data.

This decision means we can keep company expenses significantly lower, by architecting our product in different ways than what conventional Big Tech wisdom dictates, which is very Big Data-focused. It also means we can process data even faster than conventional Big Data approaches. By exclusively focusing on the data scale that most of the social sector uses, we can both reduce costs for nonprofits while improving performance.

By exclusively focusing on the data scale that most of the social sector uses, we can both reduce costs for nonprofits while improving performance.

Program management as a data management customization problem

Avandar isn't the first data integration company out there. We just happen to be the first one to decide that Big Data is not the most important data scale that needs attention. But when it comes to data management, the tech industry has not yet figured out how to generalize this solution. This is why we have a proliferation of different “management” systems based on the data’s purpose. We have CRMs, donor management, logistics management, patient case management, task management…the list goes on.

Program management is, at its core, just data management. What all these management systems have in common is that they are all tracking some resource (a task, case, customer, donor, warehouse, hospital, etc.). This resource can have metadata, can be assigned to someone, can be commented on, can have attachments, and can have a history of how its data changes. I have personally lost count of how many different times I have built data management systems with all these features. I have essentially built the same backend architecture over and over again. Even though all these projects had different names and purposes for their resources, under the hood, the data models all looked the same.

At Avandar, we’re taking on the challenge of representing all of these management systems in one generalized platform. To do this, we’re reducing the problem to its mathematical foundations: a rarely celebrated and spoken about field known as Description Logic, which provides a formal and logically structured approach to represent knowledge. Other platforms seek to model the domains they work in; we are modeling the process of data modeling itself. By following a well-researched and theoretically-validated approach, we can build one single platform that can be customized for any program. Don’t worry: as a user you won’t need to know any math or coding. Let us handle the algorithms, you focus on your mission.

As for the customization piece, we’re building a plugin marketplace to allow you to one-click install the plugins you need to customize the platform to suit your exact needs. This process will be user-friendly and require no technical knowledge. We understand that every program will always have their own unique needs for day-to-day operations. With Avandar, you will be able to fully customize the platform to align with your program’s operations. Do you need to send an SMS to enrolled participants of your program? Do you need to load a map with all the health facilities in your province? Do you need to load government open data to overlay it on your program data? Our plugin marketplace will have you covered.

We can’t predict all your organization's needs. Instead, we are building Avandar as a foundational platform, driven by our real-world knowledge and experience in the social sector, to manage any type of program. After that, we leave the customization up to you. We are building an initial set of plugins to cover the most common use cases we know of, but as your feature requests come in, we will add more plugins.

Avandar will be released as a fully open sourced product and we also intend to open-source the plugin marketplace API, which will allow any organization to build their own plugins, either for their own purposes, or to make them available for the broader social sector. Avandar will be offered as a subscription-based SaaS product, in order to exist as a sustainable business, but for transparency and ethical development, our code will be fully open source. We hope to encourage a community of developers to contribute to the platform and ensure it remains a tool for good. If any organizations wish to self-host the product themselves, they will be able to do so.

Become an early adopter

As of June 2025, Avandar is pre-launch and preparing for an alpha release of the platform. At this stage, we are looking for users who are willing to be early adopters of the platform. We will be inviting a maximum of 20 early adopters.

As an early adopter, you would help us with:

• A commitment to provide regular feedback, at least once every 2 weeks.
• Willingness to test new features and report bugs or usability issues.
• Participating in occasional user interviews or surveys to share insights on functionality and design and how the platform is or is not helping you or your organization.
• Sharing suggestions for plugins or features that can enhance your program operations.

You do not have to work in a nonprofit to be an early adopter. We would also like to learn from users interested in Avandar for academic, research, or even personal use.

In return, we offer our early adopters:

• The ability to use Avandar at no cost until we have a public beta launch.
• Access to a special discounted early-adopter price for the beta product.
• A direct line to the Avandar team to share feedback and user requests.
• Priority feature development, ensuring that the first features or plugins we release are tailored to the needs of your organization.
• The ability to shape the direction of a platform that will impact the entire social sector: millions of mission-driven organizations around the world and the billions of community members they serve.

If you are interested in being part of Avandar’s early-adopter cohort please email earlyadopter@avandarlabs.com.

Thank you for being on this journey with us.