Microsoft Has Acquired Startup Ally.io

Microsoft announced this week in a blog post that it has acquired Ally.io, a software service that helps companies measure their progress against OKRs (objectives and key results).

This is a common way the management measures both individual and company progress.

The two firms did not share the purchase price but Microsoft has plans to incorporate Ally into its Viva family of employee experience products. Ally’s customes already include Dropbox and Salesforce’s Slack.

The tech giant says that the idea behind Viva and the Ally acquisition is to provide a more transparent way to communicate company goals and objectives to employees.

“Aligning employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities is top of mind for every organization. To do this, leaders need to invest in tools that communicate transparency around big company bets and create ways to cascade aspirational goals and report results at all levels of an organization,” Kirk Koenigsbauer, chief operating officer & corporate vice president in charge of experiences and devices wrote in the post.

Ally.io’s software will join Viva, which Microsoft introduced this year as part of its Teams communications app.

“Ally.io and Microsoft Viva will enrich how people and teams come together to build alignment and achieve better business outcomes,” wrote Koenigsbauer. “Over the next year, we’ll be investing to bring Ally.io into the Microsoft cloud, evolve the existing integrations with Microsoft Teams, and weave Ally.io into Viva, Office, Power BI and the broader set of Microsoft 365 apps and services.”

Vetri Vellore, a former Microsoft employee, founded Ally.io in 2017. The start-up is based in Seattle and has 275 employees, according to LinkedIn data.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.