Vancouver workforce analytics startup Visier has acquired the assets of California-based employee experience platform Yva.ai.
Both companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the transaction, which represents Visier’s first acquisition to date. The move comes about 10 months after Visier secured $154 million CAD in equity Series E funding from Goldman Sachs at a $1.2 billion valuation.
“Bringing together what they have with what we have, we think, is a proverbial one plus one equals three.”
-Dave Weisbeck, Visier
As part of the Yva.ai deal, Visier is acquiring all of Yva.ai’s product assets, as well as the “key talent” behind it, including Yva.ai’s engineering, data science, support, and operations teams.
The pandemic-driven shift to remote and hybrid work environments, and the great resignation, have put added pressure on companies to understand, optimize, and retain their workforce.
Amid this environment, Visier plans to combine Yva.ai’s capabilities with its own tech and HR data, to launch a new collaboration analytics solution this summer that will provide insight into how people work.
“Bringing together what they have with what we have, we think, is a proverbial one plus one equals three,” Visier CSO Dave Weisbeck told BetaKit in an interview.
Founded in 2010, Visier sells people analytics and workforce planning software solutions to companies. Visier currently serves 15,000 customers across 75 countries, including Adobe, BASF, Bridgestone, Electronic Arts, McKesson, MerckKGaA, and Uber. The company caters to a wide range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, hospitality, life sciences, manufacturing, and tech.
Santa Clara-based Yva.ai uses artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to provide insight into employee well-being, satisfaction, productivity, and how employees and teams work and collaborate in different environments. The startup sources its data from corporate tools like Microsoft Office, Zoom, and Slack, supplementing this data with peer-to-peer polling.
Over 30 of Yva.ai’s 50-plus employees, including Yva.ai co-founder and CEO David Yang, are joining Visier’s 500-person team as part of the acquisition.
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Yang called the sale “an exciting deal” for Yva.ai, adding that joining forces with Visier increases Yva.ai’s market exposure opportunity “exponentially.”
Ryan Wong, Visier’s co-founder and CEO, said the acquisition reflects Visier’s goal of helping companies “understand the human truths–and the hidden truths–within their organizations by shining light on how people work and how people work together.”
“The ability to combine the technology and marketing efforts of two of the leading people analytics companies Visier and Yva.ai drives non-linear success,” Yang told BetaKit. “Thanks to this acquisition, in just a year, the result of many years of research work of Yva.ai will be available to literally millions of users of Visier around the world.”
In March, Visier launched People Cloud, which the company claims “bridges the gap between people and business outcomes.” Weisbeck described linking employees to business outcomes as “something that was really important.” But according to the CSO, there was still another piece of the puzzle missing.
“You have this gap between, I can tell you about the outcome, I can tell you about the input, but I can’t tell you about the piece in the middle, which is how people work,” said Weisbeck. “We really haven’t had systems to be able to measure that in a meaningful way.”
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Yva.ai helps companies identify urgent burnout risks, which teams work best together, the impact of hybrid and remote work, and which employees have a disproportionate impact on performance and culture.
By adding Yva.ai’s tech to its own, Visier hopes to provide its customers with a better idea of how people work that will serve as both a standalone solution and a product that can be integrated with Visier’s platform.
“Now we can understand the connection of the makeup of the team to those business outcomes, but now we can also understand how those teams work together,” said Weisbeck.
Visier is not acquiring Yva.ai’s customers as part of this deal. Yva.ai’s team will be working with those customers to determine whether they would like to onboard Visier’s solutions.
Weisbeck said he could “neither confirm nor deny” whether Visier plans to make any more acquisitions in the near future.
“However … we did raise a lot of funds, we’re very aggressive on the space in terms of we’re seeing the market really light up from a demand perspective,” said Weisbeck. “We think there’s a number of use-cases that we might want to execute on faster than you can achieve just by building it all from the ground yourself.”
Feature image courtesy Visier.