Nava, a public benefit corporation that designs and builds digital services for government agencies, said on February 3, 2026 that it had acquired Beam, a cloud software company that runs cash assistance and emergency aid programs. The price was not disclosed.
Nava plans to add Beam's capabilities to Strata, its collection of open-source tools that government agencies and their contractors can use to deliver public services. Beam's experience covers three parts of a benefits program: managing cases, processing claims and making payments.
Beam's founder and chief executive, David Helene, said the combined company was aiming for systemic change in how benefits are delivered, not only in 2026 but across the next ten years.
What Beam built
Beam began in 2016 as Edquity, a startup that sent emergency financial aid to college students who ran into unexpected costs, according to ECMC Foundation, an early investor. The goal was to get money to students quickly and with less paperwork, and to use data to decide who received aid and when. One early deployment was a district-wide pilot at what is now Dallas College.
The company later renamed itself Beam and widened its focus to safety net, emergency aid and cash assistance programs run by governments and other institutions. It acts as the payment provider of record for the programs it runs.
According to Nava's announcement, Beam has paid out more than $400 million to more than 300,000 eligible recipients in 39 states. ECMC Foundation gave slightly higher figures, saying the platform had delivered $400 million to over 375,000 people and families in more than 40 states before the sale.
“Acquiring Beam is a significant milestone that will enable us to meet our clients' needs today while reducing risk as agencies take on more ambitious modernization work.”
Why Nava is buying
Nava was founded in 2015 with six people and now has close to 700 employees. It works as a systems integrator for federal and state governments, building and modernizing the software behind public services.
Rohan Bhobe, Nava's co-founder and chief executive, said the acquisition would let the company meet its clients' current needs and reduce risk as agencies take on more ambitious modernization projects. He said Beam's technology would make Strata both broader and deeper.
Nava describes Strata as an open, end-to-end stack. The company's argument is that a government agency, or a vendor working for one, can use it to build dependable software quickly without becoming locked in to a single supplier. Adding Beam gives Strata a working payments and case-management layer that has already handled hundreds of millions of dollars.
The founder and the funding
Helene founded the company in 2016. ECMC Foundation's program-related investment arm, Education Innovation Ventures, invested in 2019, and one of its staff joined Beam's board that year.
CB Insights puts Beam's total funding at about $18.7 million across 14 rounds. That includes a $6.4 million Series A in November 2022, backed by investors including Potencia Ventures, Imaginable Futures, Lumina Impact Ventures, Michelson Runway, Schmidt Futures, Spring Point Partners and the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, and a $4.55 million convertible note in April 2024.
Helene said Beam had acted as a first mover in building a product that handles cash assistance across the whole life of a program. He also said that $400 million was only a small part of the government benefits landscape, and that pairing Beam's product with Nava's work as a systems integrator gave him confidence the combined company could deliver simpler government services at scale.
What happens to agencies
Neither company said how existing Beam programs would be handled during the integration or whether the Beam name would continue. Nava said only that Beam's capabilities would become part of Strata.
For agencies that already work with Nava, the deal means payments and claims tools could come from the same provider that builds their other benefit systems.
