Introducing PanasonicWELL

Yoky Matsuoka
3 min readSep 6, 2023

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Over the years, I’ve taken to Medium to share milestones in my career and updates along my journey and today I have another exciting milestone to share.

This one feels different. It feels like a culmination of what I’ve been building towards since I first realized my passion for building technology to help people back in the robotics lab. That passion has evolved into a clear mission, one that I’ve pursued from my time in academia, to my time in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, and Nest) and the reason why I ultimately joined Panasonic in October 2019. My mission is to enable people to be who they want to be through the power of technology. I want to pursue this on a global scale and to help people and families around the world live healthier and happier lives.

Today, I’m honored to share that my role at Panasonic is evolving. In addition to continuing to serve as Founder & CEO of Yohana, I will also be leading a new innovation lab within Panasonic Holdings Corporation with the explicit mission to constantly create possibilities for people to feel healthier every day. We’re calling this new global venture PanasonicWELL.

All offerings within this organization will be brought to life with a clear objective — to make a meaningful impact on people’s lives, their families, and society. PanasonicWELL is grounded in the spirit of Kōnosuke Matsushita’s original vision for all of Panasonic, to foster prosperity, bring happiness to people’s lives, and make the world a better place. We will build on the original vision and create solutions that address the challenges faced by modern families.

There are universal goals all modern families share: caring well, eating well, sleeping well, moving well, working well and aging well. The PanasonicWELL suite of products and services will meet families where they already are and support them through new and existing hardware products with software-enabled experiences. PanasonicWELL will incubate new brands and products focused on health, wellness, and well-being and enhance existing businesses by building a unified platform to seamlessly unite and integrate our offerings. We honor the intimate privilege of being welcomed into your home with utmost data privacy, and industry-leading Responsible AI with human beings serving where technology cannot.

The vision for PanasonicWELL is everything we intended when we initially launched Yohana, but it’s also so much more. Yohana remains an important part of our portfolio, and is the first offering from the ecosystem of PanasonicWELL. But it’s certainly not the last. With families at the center, our intention is to build a series of interconnected products within this ecosystem to tackle the enormous challenges that modern families face in today’s world.

Through interviews around the globe, we know that families across countries, cultures, and continents are all facing similar challenges. We want PanasonicWELL to address these core needs of the family and to be the solution to help people live healthier and happier lives for the next 100 years.

This is the world we’re building within PanasonicWELL — the next chapter in Panasonic’s journey.

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Yoky Matsuoka

Mom of 4, building technology to enhance well-being for families, CEO of PanasonicWELL, Founder & CEO of Yohana, MacArthur Fellow, former @ Google, Nest, Apple