Motivity has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Calmanac, the ABA practice management system behind its 2025 platform expansion, uniting the two founding teams and ending the clinical-versus-operational trade-off for autism therapy providers.
Key Takeaways
- A long partnership becomes ownership. Motivity and Calmanac have worked together since a 2023 integration and an April 2025 practice management launch built on Calmanac’s technology. CEO Smith Anderson says the acquisition grew out of deep product alignment rather than a single deal moment.
- Private equity backing set the stage but did not drive it. A $27 million growth investment from Five Elms Capital in early 2025 gave Motivity room to make long-term bets. Anderson says the acquisition was not part of those initial discussions and was driven by team alignment, not a mandate to buy growth.
- The people who built Calmanac are staying. Founders Madhuri Mandaogade and Neelam Chavan join Motivity’s executive team to lead product vision and operations as General Manager and Chief Technology Officer, respectively.
- Enterprise complexity is the throughline. Calmanac was built inside the operational demands of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD), one of the largest ABA providers in the country. That origin gives the combined platform a claim to enterprise-grade scheduling, billing, and compliance that many competitors retrofit later.
Applied behavior analysis is a field built on relationships: between clinicians and the children they treat, between behavior analysts and the families who trust them, and, increasingly, between the software vendors that run a practice and the practices that depend on them. On May 21, Motivity moved to consolidate one of those relationships. The Honolulu-based clinical software company announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Calmanac, the practice management platform it has spent more than a year building its operational layer on top of.
The acquisition closes a loop that opened in 2023. That year, Motivity, known for the clinical data collection used by behavior analysts, connected its system to Calmanac, a practice management platform handling the operational machinery of an ABA clinic: scheduling, billing, authorizations, and compliance. In April 2025, Motivity went further, formally launching its own practice management offering on Calmanac’s enterprise technology. Owning the platform outright, the company says, was less a decision than a recognition.
“It’s hard to point to one specific moment where something clicked for us,” Smith Anderson, Motivity’s Chief Executive Officer, said in an interview with Acuity Media Network. “The teams started working together and everything was just easy. We realized we weren’t simply integrating products, we were aligning around the same view of what ABA providers actually needed.” The conversations, he said, shifted from how the two systems connect to how the entire experience should work if it were designed correctly from the beginning.
From ABA Integration Partner to Acquisition
The deal arrives roughly a year after Five Elms Capital, a software-focused growth equity firm, led a $27 million investment in Motivity and installed Anderson, previously an operator at the firm, as chief executive. Motivity founder Rex Jakobovits moved into a Chief of Strategy and Innovation role at the same time. The timing places the acquisition squarely within a broader wave of private equity capital flowing into behavioral health, though Anderson is careful to frame it as a product decision the funding made possible rather than one it required.
“The Five Elms partnership absolutely gave us the ability to think more expansively and long term about where the market is going,” he said. The acquisition, he added, was not part of the initial conversations with the firm in early 2025. “That said, this was never a go-buy-growth conversation. We were very intentional. The core question was whether bringing these teams together would materially improve the platform and the experience for ABA providers.” Anderson declined to discuss the financial terms of the transaction. He described Five Elms as supportive throughout but said the logic was strategic, rooted in what he called shared conviction between the two teams.
That conviction, in Anderson’s telling, is what separates this deal from the broader pattern of consolidation in a market where scale increasingly determines which ABA platforms command a premium. The integration began producing results within months of the 2025 launch, he said, and it became clear the two companies were building toward something larger together.
Calmanac’s Founding Team Joins Motivity Leadership
For an acquisition pitched on continuity, the personnel decisions carry weight. Madhuri Mandaogade, who co-founded Calmanac and its parent company, Humane Business Intelligence Technology Solutions (hBITS), joins Motivity’s executive leadership team as General Manager. She will lead the practice management product vision and oversee the company’s growing team in India. Her co-founder, Neelam Chavan, will become Chief Technology Officer across Motivity Engineering. Anderson called adding the two of them “one of the easiest decisions in this process” and said the deal would not have happened without them.
“We have a shared vision for how to build Motivity in a way that doesn’t lose sight of what got us here, while also recognizing what we’ll need to do differently as we continue to grow,” Anderson said. He expects their influence to extend well beyond the practice management team, pointing to the engineering and operational depth the pair bring to the company’s investments in AI and automation. “This team has lived the real-world operational challenges of ABA,” he said. “They’ve built systems around payer complexity, authorizations, scheduling constraints, credentialing, compliance, and all the things that become incredibly difficult as organizations scale. That experience is hard to replicate from the outside.”
The appointments also make Motivity an equally women-led software company, a profile Anderson notes is uncommon in enterprise SaaS. In a field where the clinical workforce is majority women, the company frames that as a milestone worth marking.
Much of that experience traces to a single, demanding customer. Calmanac was built to support the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD), under Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh’s leadership, among the largest ABA organizations in the United States, spanning multiple states and hundreds of payer relationships. Anderson argues that origin is what gives the platform its edge. “What makes Calmanac unique is that it was built inside real operational complexity from the beginning, not adapted later,” he said. “Supporting an organization the size and scale of CARD forced the platform to solve hard problems around scheduling, payer rules, authorizations, and compliance very early in its evolution.”
What the Acquisition Means for ABA Providers
The practical case Anderson makes for ownership is that integrations, however smooth, still assume two separate systems straining to stay in sync. “When everything lives under one roof, you can design workflows, data models, automation, and decision-making holistically instead of negotiating between systems,” he said. In ABA, he argues, the line between operational and clinical decisions is thinner than it looks: scheduling affects continuity of care, authorizations affect treatment delivery, documentation affects reimbursement and compliance, and staffing affects outcomes.
What he wants providers to feel, he said, is the absence of friction. “Fewer workarounds. Fewer disconnected workflows. More automation. Fewer moments where the clinical team and operational team are fighting the software instead of using it.” That promise lands in a market where ABA clinics still run scheduling, billing, and intake through largely manual steps. For practices already using Motivity for clinical data collection, the company says scheduling, billing, and authorizations will no longer require a separate system. Existing practice management customers, it says, will see the same platform with a larger combined team behind it.
The acquisition also folds a core piece of autism care’s back office, revenue cycle and billing, directly into Motivity, and it raises a question for providers who rely on the company’s other technology integrations. Anderson says the company’s posture toward interoperability does not change, even as practice management becomes a core competency rather than a partnership. “No platform should assume it can or should do everything,” he said. “Providers have different workflows, preferences, and operational realities, and integrations remain an important part of supporting that flexibility.” Whether competing practice management vendors continue to integrate as willingly with a company that now owns a direct competitor is a separate question, and one the market will answer over time.
Anderson frames the deal as a step rather than a destination. “I think ABA, like much of healthcare, is entering a period where the distinction between clinical systems, operational systems, analytics, compliance, and AI-driven workflows starts consolidating into a more unified experience,” he said. “This acquisition strengthens the foundation for that future, but it’s not the endpoint. If anything, it expands what becomes possible next.” For ABA providers weighing how much of their operation to entrust to a single vendor, that ambition is both the promise and the open question.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Motivity acquire Calmanac or just partner with it?
Motivity has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Calmanac outright. The two companies had partnered since a 2023 integration, and Motivity launched a practice management product built on Calmanac’s technology in April 2025, but this agreement makes Calmanac part of Motivity rather than a separate partner.
What happens to Calmanac’s leadership and team after the acquisition?
Calmanac co-founder Madhuri Mandaogade joins Motivity’s executive leadership team as General Manager, leading practice management product vision and the company’s India operations. Her co-founder, Neelam Chavan, becomes Chief Technology Officer across Motivity Engineering. The company says the people who built and supported Calmanac remain involved.
How is the Motivity Calmanac acquisition connected to Five Elms funding?
Five Elms Capital led a $27 million growth investment in Motivity in early 2025 and brought in CEO Smith Anderson, a former Five Elms operator. Anderson says that funding gave Motivity the ability to make long-term investments but that the Calmanac acquisition was driven by product alignment rather than the investment itself. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
What does the deal mean for current Motivity and Calmanac customers?
Motivity says clinical data collection customers will be able to handle scheduling, billing, and authorizations without a separate system, and that existing practice management customers will keep the same platform with a larger combined team. Calmanac customers become part of Motivity’s broader platform and user community.
Why does Calmanac’s connection to CARD matter for ABA practice management?
Calmanac was originally built to support the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD), one of the largest ABA providers in the United States. Motivity argues that building inside that level of operational complexity from the start gave the platform enterprise-grade scheduling, billing, and compliance capabilities that competing systems often add only after scaling.
