This week BetterUp proudly announced the acquisition of two advanced software companies — Motive and Impraise — to help us continue to grow our community, platform, and the BetterUp team. With these, our first formal acquisitions, we’re excited to take another big step forward in advancing our mission to help even more people live their lives with clarity, purpose, and passion.
These acquisitions mark an important moment for BetterUp. Our growing momentum as a company reflects the market momentum for coaching and mental health and the urgent need for innovative and proactive solutions.
It couldn’t be more thrilling that this announcement comes on the heels of another recent achievement: surpassing 1 million coaching sessions on the BetterUp platform. Together, these milestones represent a growing recognition of the value an investment in human transformation for the workforce delivers to the organization and how it drives business outcomes, today and in the future — in addition to supporting personal growth, creating meaningful change, and having real impact in people’s lives.
As the first company to secure a patent for virtual coaching and the first to reach 1 million coaching sessions, we have focused on leading and innovating in this space — the addition of Motive and Impraise builds on and accelerates this work.
Accelerating our journey to unlock human potential
Since we started nearly eight years ago, BetterUp has been a leader in unlocking human potential through engaging individuals in developing the mindsets, skills, and behaviors to perform at their best personally and professionally. Whether you’re looking to become a better leader, build a better career, or be a better parent or partner, proactive mental fitness is intricately connected to performance.
We made a choice to do the hard work of building out a robust coaching product and platform that offers proven, science-based, evidence-backed results. We focused our innovative efforts on precision and scalability. How could we target coaching interventions that would more reliably help individuals achieve and sustain behavior change, and how could we do it in a way that would reach as many people as possible?
With the Motive and Impraise teams, BetterUp now has the largest dataset and learning on what it takes to drive personal and professional growth, informing our approach and making it the most evidence-based and effective in the market. In addition, these world-class teams bring decades of experience developing breakthrough artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into valuable products with consumer-grade user experiences that can reach more people.
Now more than ever, we can meet our Members where they are with what they need — no matter their career stage, level, or location. We can better serve our Customers' needs with invaluable data and insights into how their people are doing at any given moment, what support they need, and what they're worried about. Quite simply, we help leaders look beneath the surface and gain understanding of what's going on across their workforce.
Boosting our intelligence of human emotion
How well we can recognize, understand, and relate to our own emotions and those of others is core to effective and inspiring leadership and determines whether we thrive in our work and personal lives. Motive brings to BetterUp decades of collective experience in creating technology that enables understanding of human emotion at scale and will further help our Customers and Members understand human emotion and the critical role it plays in performance, well-being, and self-actualization.
Their breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies have helped organizations tap into the emotions driving their workforces and customers. By aggregating and distilling this data to surface specific, relevant, and actionable insights, Motive accomplishes "empathy at scale" by recognizing emotion's critical role in the employee experience.
Many on the Motive team were founders and early employees of the Experience Project, one of the first companies to explore an intentional community for human emotion (and a huge influence on Eddie and me as we were building BetterUp). For us, the Experience Project remains a shining example of how intentional, conscious craftsmanship could positively impact the lives of millions of people while generating the data to advance our collective understanding of humanity.
BetterUp's Coaches today deliver technology and science-backed solutions to develop whole individuals thriving both personally and professionally. With the addition of Motive’s technologies, special expertise in an HCM (human capital management) context, and their rich understanding of the tools and systems that HR and business leaders currently rely upon, BetterUp can take bigger strides. We are developing a product roadmap that can reach more people across the enterprise, and provide development and behavior change that is significant and valuable to the individual and the organization.
Accelerating our ability to serve Europe and beyond
Last month, we announced our expansion into the European market, with offices in London and Munich. Now, the acquisition of Amsterdam-based Impraise will help scale our efforts and create a strong foundation of regional expertise and relationships across Europe, enabling us to better understand and tailor our precision development to the unique needs of the EMEA market. In addition, Impraise’s commitment to intuitive technologies that create team environments for people to do their best work will bolster our research and development and analytics capabilities and accelerate our product roadmap for the region.
The company has achieved incredible impact with tools that help organizations build more engaged and high-performing teams by enabling managers to better understand and grow their people with feedback loops, goal setting, regular 1:1s, actionable reviews, and more. Much like BetterUp, Impraise understands the outsized impact that personal development at scale, when done correctly, can drive improved outcomes for organizations. With Impraise’s deep well of expertise applying an analytical lens on team and individual performance, we can further increase our ability to provide the critical insights that our European customers value and need.
We know how powerful the combination of technology and human insight can be in helping individuals maximize their potential and businesses reach their goals. By adding both Motive and Impraise, we will have the opportunity for immediate and broad impact as we enter the next phase of BetterUp’s journey together. We’re so thrilled about what these teams will bring to BetterUp as we build upon the most comprehensive and personalized enterprise employee experience in the world.
