Asana raise $50 million at $1.5 billion valuation

Dustin Moskovitz
Asana

• On Thursday, Asana — a
  collaboration and productivity software company started
  by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz — announced that
  it had raised a $50 million Series E funding round. 
• Asana is now valued at $1.5 billion. 
• “It’s really nice to cross over that concrete mark,” Asana
  CEO Dustin Moskovitz said, referring to reaching the unicorn
  status of companies valued over $1 billion.
• 2018 has been a momentous year for Asana, as the company
  already raised a $75 million Series D in January and says it’s
  revenue is growing 90% year over year. 
• With the latest funding round, Asana plans to continue its
  international growth (first, by opening an office next week in
  Australia) and increase its number of employees from 400 to 600
  by the end of 2019. 

After more than a decade, Asana can
finally call itself a unicorn. 

On Thursday, Asana announced that it had raised a $50 million
Series E funding round, putting the company at a $1.5 billion
valuation. The funding round was led by Generation Investment
Management with participation from others like Benchmark Capital
and Founders Fund. In total, Asana has raised over $2o0
million to date. 

“It’s really nice to cross over that concrete mark,” Asana CEO
Dustin Moskovitz told Business Insider, referring to reaching the
so-called unicorn status of companies valued at more than $1
billion. “But ultimately it’s just a milestone on the way to
something much bigger. The market opportunity in front of us is
gigantic. We’re still just getting started.”

2018 has been a momentous year for the work management software
company, which its COO Chris Farinacci says, “eliminates work
about work.”

Read more:


This Facebook cofounder’s $900 million startup has a new plan to
go after big business customers

Earlier this year, Asana raised a $75 million Series D and in
early November, announced it had reached 50,000 paying
organizations — alongside its over 1 million companies using the
product for free. Asana’s also said its recurring revenue has
increased for seven consecutive quarters, growing at a pace of
90% year-over-year. 

“Now it’s going mainstream”

“The biggest driver [of growth] is this need for this category,”
Farinacci says of Asana’s product, a cloud-based software service
that lets workers collaborate on projects and assign tasks.

“On top of all this collaboration software out there and
communication software, there’s a need for clarity for teams. We
started with selling to the disrupters — the Uber’s and Airbnb’s
and such. But now it’s going mainstream and going global.” 

With its latest injection of funding, Asana plans to expand its
international reach. Next week, the company will open an office
in Australia and in the first half of 2019, an office in
Japan. 

The product is already being used in 195 countries and available
in 6 languages, and the company says 50% of new revenue is coming
from outside the US.

Moskovitz also tells us that the company will grow the number of
“Asanas.” Today, the San Francisco-based company has around 400
employees, but by the end of 2019, Moskovitz says the goal is to
have 600. 

After a decade, Moskovitz is as excited as ever

For the one-time Facebook co-founder, Moskovitz seems
enthusiastic about the future of his decade-old company. 

“Honestly, it’s more exciting than ever because the business is
taking off. The category is taking off. One way to look at our
growth is that we’ve added more value to the world over the last
15 months than we have in the entire history of the company
before that,” he explains. 

As for what keeps Moskovitz at the company he created immediately
after leaving Facebook in 2008, he tells us: “I think this is a
really important point of leverage in the world. No matter what
type of problem you think about — whether it’s health care,
education, climate change, any number of non-profits — any of
those missions ultimately have a team of people behind it. And
those teams need to collaborate well. And that means they need
great software like Asana.”