The move brings together two companies involved in the delivery of public benefits, though it’s a little broader than that — Nava’s open source platform Strata is made for service delivery, which can include anything from passport adjudication to Medicaid.
It’s a unique gov tech deal in many regards. Nava is a rare public benefit corporation operating in the space, and it grew out of the rapid-fire effort to fix healthcare.gov after its initial rough start in 2013. And it hasn’t taken any outside venture capital or private equity money; this deal was self-financed.
Also, as it acquires Beam, Nava’s not going to operate it as a product — it’s going to “modularize” its technology.
“We’re going to fold those capabilities — case management, claims processing, payments capabilities, document processing, notification capabilities — we’re going to fold all those capabilities into Strata, and Strata is now [that] open source suite of tools that give agencies everything they need to build and run modern service,” Bhobe told Government Technology.
It comes at a particularly “urgent” time for state and local government, he said, because of H.R. 1, last year’s federal budget bill that introduced new standards and requirements for the administration of public benefits programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“We’ve heard frankly ridiculous quotes from incumbent vendors saying things like, you know, for $100 million we can do this in a year,” Bhobe said. “That is completely unacceptable and totally dead on arrival in terms of what needs to be done by the end of the year. H.R. 1, on the Medicaid side, is asking agencies to have this in production, ready to go by the start of 2027. So if you work backward from that, we have less than a year to do that. We’re now through January.”
Strata, particularly with the new capabilities from Beam, is designed for flexibility, which Bhobe thinks will help states meet those requirements on time and for less money. He described the next phase of the platform as being modular but end-to-end; government customers will be able to take what they need and build it the way they need it with whatever level of vendor involvement they need.
This is opposed to proprietary technology built to fit many customers and then configured and customized toward individual customers’ needs.
“Strata is saying it’s possible to build a gold-standard technology stack [in which] the government has full control of its data, its code, its product road map, architecture, and vendors can come and go,” he said. “Vendors can eat, the government can build its own capacity and you don’t have to outsource your mission and then rent it back.”
That includes other vendors, which are free to build on Nava’s technology without Nava involved. The company’s hope is that its presence in the market will reduce vendor lock-in while helping government agencies build their own internal capacity to develop and own their own technology.
“We’re not afraid of that competition,” Bhobe said. “We encourage that. That’s what it’s going to take to advance the field.”
Nava is significantly larger than Beam; Nava’s employee count is about 700, while Beam’s is 11. Beam, however, has an outsized reach — its technology has been used to disburse more than $400 million to 300,000-plus recipients in 39 states. Beam, once known as Edquity, has made headlines in the past for its work on rent and utility relief programs.
“While we’ve accomplished so much, $400 million barely scratches the surface of the government benefits landscape,” David Helene, Beam’s CEO and founder, said in a press release. “Bringing Beam’s best-in-class product offering into Nava and pairing it with Nava’s track record as a human-centered, outcomes-focused systems integrator to federal and state government, gives me confidence in our ability to deliver simpler, more effective government services at scale.”
