With New Series C Funding, Thrive’s Mission Meets the Moment

I’m excited to announce today that Thrive Global has raised an $80 million Series C round co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Owl Ventures to accelerate our growth and impact in ending the stress and burnout epidemic and helping people live and work with greater well-being and mental resilience. 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. We’re delighted that?Mamoon Hamid, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of the earliest investors in Slack, Figma, Box, Yammer, Intercom and Coda, will be joining our board to help propel us forward. And we’re also delighted to welcome?Ian Chiu, Managing Director at Owl Ventures, a global leader in education technology investing, to our board. Owl’s investments include 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 started Thrive four-and-a-half years ago, the problems of burnout and the mental health crisis were still gaining mainstream recognition. 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.

Our Impact

We’ve built a methodology using science and years of testing and iterating to crack the code on behavior change, moving people from awareness to action. Since we launched in 2016, we’ve helped employees at more than 100 organizations in over 40 countries adopt Thrive’s Microsteps — small, science-backed steps to help build healthy habits. And with the launch last year of our AI-powered behavior change platform, we’ve been able to scale our impact dramatically, delivering our 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 our app: Recharge, Food, Move, Money, Focus and Connect. Thriving Mind — a mental health and resilience program we developed in partnership with Stanford Medicine — has been rolled out to many of our customers, including Accenture’s global workforce of over 500,000. The engagement has been unprecedented,?with over 170,000 people participating — more than tripling the company benchmarks. But what’s more important is the impact: 91% say they feel better equipped to face challenges in the workplace. Accenture’s CEO, Julie Sweet, described Thriving Mind as “a core part of how we are thinking about leaving our employees net better off.” And our Leadership Journeys, a tech-enabled immersive program designed to help business leaders cascade well-being as a strategic priority throughout their companies, have impacted over 20,000 leaders from around the world, with 90% reporting that they’re more prepared to handle stress and 80% saying it helped them connect with co-workers in uncertain times.?

At Walmart, we’re 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. As Donna Morris, Walmart’s Chief People Officer, put it, “We start every global townhall with a wellness moment. That wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Thrive.”

Across our customer base, we’re deploying our 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 webinars that spark and sustain culture change, and internal and external marketing campaigns that amplify the voices of company leaders and employees at every level sharing their own stories,?and demonstrating their commitment to putting the well-being of their people first. And we deliver 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 — to complete our uniquely effective behavior change solution. As we’re proving with our 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.

“We really leaned heavily into our partnership with Thrive around daily mental health exercises, the Thrive app, Microsteps and Reset,” Tracy Layney, Chief Human Resources Officer at Levi Strauss, says. “Like how do we take care of ourselves every day in a way that allows for good mental health, even in this time of extreme stress?”

Where We’re Going

The close of this funding gives us the resources to accelerate our growth and our impact. We’ll be more equipped than ever to bring our behavior change platform and solutions to more companies around the world, helping individuals build healthier habits and activating sustainable cultures of well-being, resilience and high performance.?

We’ll expand our product, engineering and design teams and invest in our data science, AI and machine learning capabilities to build an even more intelligent Microstep engine. We will use data-driven AI?to deliver the right Microstep, the right story and the right role model to our users at the right time. We’ll add more resources to the development of our 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.

We’ll double down on hiring for our go-to-market teams, including sales, marketing and?customer success. And while our sales team remains laser-focused on bringing our SaaS enterprise product to more and more companies around the world, we’ll build a business development and partnerships team that brings Thrive to partners to integrate our behavior change solutions into their offerings to consumers, self-insured employers and call center operators. Altogether, the new funding will enable us to continue scaling our impact at both the individual and organizational level, delivering a clear ROI for our customers.

And… We’re Hiring!

Like any ambitious 4-year-old, we’re growing fast — and we’re going to need a lot more Thrivers to get where we’re going! We’re hiring across our engineering team — from mobile to backend to infrastructure, web and data science — along with our product and design teams, business development and sales. So if you or someone you know is looking for a new opportunity to join a company with a great mission, check out our?Careers page?for more information.

Gratitude

I’ll end this post the same way we end every weekly team meeting at Thrive: with gratitude. As I reflect on how much more there is to come, I’m filled with gratitude for all of the customers, partners, investors and, of course, Thrivers who’ve?worked so hard to bring us to this moment. In particular, I’m grateful to board members Somesh Dash from IVP, who led our Series B and has been an incredible partner to me on this journey with unwavering support as we doubled down on our SaaS business model; Andrew Firlik from JAZZ Venture Partners, a neurosurgeon-turned-VC whose wisdom I can always count on; and Dr. David Agus, whose guidance on bringing Thrive into healthcare and prioritizing our AI and data analytics capabilities will be all the more instrumental for our future. In addition, our board observers Cack Wilhelm from IVP and Meghan Reynolds from JAZZ have been invaluable during the last critical year of our growth. All of us at Thrive are filled with energy and optimism for what’s ahead as we build into our next chapter. Onward, upward and inward!

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