Thrive Global, the behavior change technology company founded by Arianna Huffington, announced today that it has raised an $80 million Series C round co-led by Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins to accelerate Thrive’s growth and impact in ending the burnout epidemic and helping people live and work with less stress, more productivity and greater well-being and mental resilience. Hamid, one of the earliest investors in Slack, Figma, Box, Yammer, Intercom and Coda, will join Thrive’s Board of Directors to help propel the company forward.
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Owl Ventures, a global leader in education technology investing, co-led the round and Ian Chiu, Managing Director at Owl, will also join the Thrive board. Owl has made investments in skilling and learning companies such as Degreed and MasterClass, and their commitment to Thrive reflects their recognition that as we focus on reskilling and upskilling employees around the world, we must also empower them to build mental resilience and manage stress. The round also includes additional investment from existing institutional shareholders IVP and JAZZ Venture Partners, as well as a new investment from funds managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
“When I founded Thrive Global four-and-a-half years ago, the problems of burnout and the mental health crisis were still gaining mainstream recognition,” said Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global. “But the pandemic highlighted the themes at the heart of Thrive’s mission like never before, bringing employee well-being, mental health and resilience to the top of companies’ agendas. And now as we’re facing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine work and productivity, this is where our mission and our platform meet the moment. This new funding is a validation of all we’ve accomplished so far — but more important, it enables us to fulfill our vision of shaping the future of the employee experience.”
Since its 2016 launch, Thrive Global has helped employees at more than 100 organizations in over 40 countries adopt Microsteps — small, science-backed steps to help build healthy habits. And with the launch last year of its AI-powered behavior change platform, it has been able to scale its impact dramatically, delivering its methodology — focused on Microsteps, storytelling, real-time stress interventions and community — through best-in-class software to everyone from frontline and call center workers to executives of multinational companies.
To date, Thrive users have taken more than 1.5 million Microsteps across the six Journeys in the Thrive app: Recharge, Food, Move, Money, Focus and Connect. Thriving Mind — a mental health and resilience program developed in partnership with Stanford Medicine — has been rolled out to many Thrive customers, including Accenture’s global workforce of over 500,000. Accenture’s CEO, Julie Sweet, described Thriving Mind as “a core part of how we are thinking about leaving our employees net better off.” At Walmart, Thrive is working both with retail and home office associates, their families and their communities to help them make small, better choices each day. And it’s having a daily impact.
Across Thrive’s customer base, the company is deploying its continuous, real-time behavior change ecosystem. At the core is the Thrive app, which helps users discover and track Microsteps and acts as a behavior change coach in their pocket. It’s reinforced by Leadership Journeys and webinars that spark and sustain culture change, and internal and external marketing campaigns that amplify the voices of company leaders and employees. Thrive completes its uniquely effective behavior change solution by delivering real-time stress interventions — like Thrive Reset, which makes it possible to take short breaks to breathe, stretch or practice gratitude, integrated directly into Microsoft Teams at Accenture and coming later this year to Zoom and Cisco Webex to help combat virtual fatigue. As Thrive is proving with its customers, well-being isn’t just a benefit, but an essential strategy for success — and it’s all the more powerful when it’s embedded into the workflow itself and embraced by both leaders and peers.
The close of this funding gives Thrive the resources to accelerate its growth and impact. Thrive will expand its product, engineering and design teams and invest in its data science, AI and machine learning capabilities to build an even more intelligent Microstep engine. Thrive will add more resources to the development of its cutting-edge Mental Resilience Dashboard, which gives management an at-a-glance view of their employees’ Burnout Risk and Resilience scores as well as targeted recommendations based on both objective and subjective data.
The company will double down on hiring for its go-to-market teams and building a business development team that brings Thrive to partners to integrate its behavior change solutions into their offerings to consumers, self-insured employers and call center operators. Altogether, the new funding will enable Thrive to continue scaling its impact at both the individual and organizational level delivering a clear ROI for its customers.
“Thrive Global has developed a methodology using science and years of testing and iterating to crack the code on behavioral change, moving people from awareness to action. Today, their team is helping the world’s leading companies, and their people, build healthy habits through inspirational storytelling and science-backed Microsteps to help navigate their new normal with less stress and greater resilience. Just a year into the platform launch, they’ve impacted millions of lives,” said Mamoon Hamid, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. “We’re proud to lead Thrive Global’s Series C and partner with Arianna Huffington and the team on their mission to end the stress and burnout epidemic and unlock human potential.”
“With its science-backed approach to behavior change, emphasis on mental health and resilience, and ability to create communities of support, Thrive Global has been ahead of the curve in so many ways,” said Ian Chiu, Managing Director at Owl Ventures. “We at Owl Ventures are particularly excited by the transformative potential of Thrive Global’s SaaS platform to teach employees and organizations around the world how to build healthy habits in an increasingly dynamic and challenging world. We are thrilled to be co-leading Thrive Global’s Series C round to propel Arianna and her team to a new stage of global growth and impact.”
“When IVP led Thrive’s Series B, we recognized that Arianna and the team were poised to have a transformative impact on the evolving market for Corporate Mindfulness,” said Somesh Dash, General Partner at IVP and a Thrive board member. “Our partnership has helped lay the groundwork for today’s Series C milestone and I’m so excited to continue the journey as Thrive moves into a new chapter as an agile SaaS platform driven by a mission that’s more relevant than ever to millions around the world.”
“Thrive has a unique ability to stay true to its core mission while growing, adapting and iterating in an ever-changing world,” said Andrew Firlik, a Thrive board member and partner at JAZZ Venture Partners. “That’s been true since day one, and now with the close of this new funding, we’re going to see it on an exponentially larger scale: a company that knows exactly what it stands for, devoting even more resources to solve our biggest problems at exactly the right moment.”
About Thrive Global
Thrive Global is a leading behavior change technology company founded by Arianna Huffington in 2016 with the mission to end the stress and burnout epidemic. Thrive helps individuals and organizations improve well-being, performance and mental resilience with its AI-powered behavior change technology platform. Thrive’s Microsteps – small, science-backed steps to improve health and productivity – have been adopted by employees at more than 100 organizations in over 40 countries, from frontline and call center workers to executives at multinational companies. Thrive Global is headquartered in New York City and has offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Athens, Bucharest and Melbourne. For more information, visit www.thriveglobal.com.
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