Houlihan Lokey Advises Atairos

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Atairos, an independent strategic investment company focused on supporting growth-oriented companies, has acquired LifeLabs Learning, the source for instantly useful manager and team upskilling programs. This partnership accelerates LifeLabs Learning’s plans to roll out digital innovations that lead to rapid learning, long-term retention, and joyful experiences in the flow of work. The transaction closed on March 23, 2023.

LifeLabs Learning takes a research-backed and data-driven approach to helping companies catalyze high performance on their teams, an approach that’s already been applied to more than 300,000 managers at over 2,000 organizations. The company’s popular Manager CORE training helps teams gain the most critical management skills to meet increasingly complex workplace demands. Bad management and employee turnover are issues that cost organizations $7 trillion per year. LifeLabs has a long history of community building in the HR, learning and development, and people operations (POPs) space. The company has a fervent following of thousands of POPs leaders through its POPS United exclusive slack community, and also hosts educational events and provides useful tools that promote both business success and a people-positive world.

Atairos is an independent strategic investment company focused on supporting growth-oriented businesses across a wide range of industries. Atairos provides a unique combination of active strategic partnership and patient long-term capital to high-potential companies and their management teams. Atairos was launched in 2016 and has approximately $6 billion of equity capital. Atairos has offices in New York City, Philadelphia, and London.

“Our founders created a programmatic model, focused on tipping points skills - the small changes that make the biggest impact - that has delighted more than 440,000 learners and served as a magnet for HR and learning & development leaders around the globe,” said LifeLabs CEO, Priscila Bala. “With Atairos as our partner, we will be able to accelerate our growth even further by investing in our vision and capabilities, including combining our uniquely impactful learning with new, proprietary digital tools. We are thrilled to partner with Atairos and look forward to their expertise and support as we continue to grow our business and positively impact our clients’ lives.”

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive financial advisor to Atairos. This transaction highlights the team’s expertise and continued success in the professional learning sector, marking the team’s 10th transaction since the beginning of 2021.