Microsoft Corp. today acquired goal-planning and execution management software startup Ally Technologies Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Founded in 2018, Ally.io offers strategic goal-planning and execution management software designed to assist businesses in executing strategies and reaching their goals. The cloud-based offering enables businesses to shift from traditional, disjointed planning and execution to a modern, objectives and key results-based framework that drives strong alignment, agility, transparency and empowers the workforce.

The Ally.io solution is pitched as making it easy to adopt objectives and key results or OKRs as a seamless part of a given user’s daily workflow. The platform has built-in OKR best practices with seamless integration with various enterprise systems. Support offered includes Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Jira, Tableau and various others. The company says that its comprehensive professional services provide continuous support, dedicated training and coaching to ensure best practices for implementation and successful change management.

Ally.io’s notable customers include BambooHR LLC, Discord Inc., Slack Inc., Arc’Teryx, Complex Networks, Overstock.com Inc. and Dropbox Inc.

Post-acquisition, Ally.io will become part of Microsoft Viva, Microsoft’s employee experience platform. Launched in February, Viva offers the ability for enterprises to provide their employees with access to company news, educational resources and other types of work-related content.

Viva launched is designed to play a similar role as traditional corporate intranet platforms. Microsoft has added artificial intelligence features to help employees extract more value from company-created content and analytics features aimed at managers to set the product apart.

Ally.io will power a new Viva module that will help people and teams build alignment and achieve better business outcomes. In addition, Ally.io will also be built into the Microsoft Cloud to evolve the existing integrations in Microsoft Teams, Office, Power BI and the broader set of Microsoft 365 apps and services.

“Flexibility and remote work have always been important, but so is the desire to do meaningful work,” Kirk Koeingsbaue, chief operating officer and corporate vice president of experiences and devices at Microsoft, said in a blog post. “The shift to hybrid has made it more challenging to keep every leader, team and individual aligned and moving to the same rhythm. Ally.io helps give everyone in the organization visibility and clarity into the entire work process, connecting everyday work to the company’s strategic objectives.”

Coming into its acquisition, Ally.io had raised $73 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Founders’ Co-op, Tiger Global, Greenoaks Capital, Vulcan Capital, Madrona Venture and Accel.

Image: Ally.io