Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global is teaming up with Zenefits

Many are familiar with Arianna Huffington’s personal journey from media mogul to outspoken sleep advocate.

In April 2007 she collapsed, broke her collarbone and woke up in a pool of blood, a well-publicized accident she attributes to sleep deprivation and exhaustion. In the years that followed, she shifted her focus to wellness, authoring two books on the topic: Thrive and The Sleep Revolution, and later founded a wellness media company called Thrive Global.

Thrive, which bills itself as a “behavior change” startup, helps businesses help their employees develop healthy relationships with technology and manage stress and burnout — issues with which Huffington is personally familiar. The company has raised nearly $43 million in venture capital funding to date, at a $121.5 million valuation as of May.

Today, Thrive is announcing a new partnership with Zenefits, the provider of software that helps small- and medium-sized business (SMBs) manage human resources, though is still often known for a series of regulatory and compliance issues that led to the exit of its founding chief executive, Parker Conrad.

The partnership will make available to employees of the 11,000 businesses that use Zenefits human resources software Thrive content, tips and tools within the Zenefits platform, and managers will be able to use the Thrive app to track and measure employee well-being.

“People are sleep deprived; people are eating the wrong food,” Huffington told TechCrunch. “It’s very basic things we can change through behavior that affect the bottom line of a company.”

“When you give employees science-based micro steps — that’s how change happens,” she added. “You need little nudges to help you change your behavior.”

Thrive educational content focuses on sleep, humans’ relationship with technology, goal setting and other issues that pertain to physical and mental health.

Huffington and Jay Fulcher, Zenefits CEO, told TechCrunch this arrangement was a year in the making.

Zenefits tapped Fulcher, the former CEO of Ooyala and Agile Software, as CEO last year. He was the third CEO in the span of 12 months after Conrad was ousted and Craft Ventures’ David Sacks stepped down after a brief stint as interim CEO. 

“{Stress] is the tipping point for things like retention, which obviously costs businesses billions and billions every year,” Fulcher said. “We have a very sophisticated and broad tech platform and to be able to put all of Thrive’s content on our platform, we think that is a really good proposition and one that customers are excited about.”

Thrive has historically worked with large enterprises, inking deals with Accenture, J.P. Morgan and others since Huffington launched the company in 2016. A partnership with Zenefits marks its first foray into SMBs. 

Thrive is backed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Sean Parker, Lerer Hippeau, Greycroft Partners and others. Zenefits, founded in 2013, is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, TPG and others. Both companies are backed by IVP.