Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz's Asana is now worth $1.5 billion

Dustin Moskovitz

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

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

On Thursday, Asana announced it had raised a $50 million series E funding round, putting the company at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Generation Investment Management with participation from others including Benchmark Capital and Founders Fund. Asana has raised over $200 million to date.

"It's really nice to cross over that concrete mark," Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz told Business Insider of 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 chief operating officer, Chris Farinacci, says "eliminates work about work."

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

'Now it's going mainstream'

Farinacci said Asana's biggest driver of growth was a need for its 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," he said. "We started with selling to the disrupters — the Ubers and Airbnbs and such. But now it's going mainstream and going global."

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

The product is already used in 195 countries and is available in six languages, and the company says half of new revenue is coming from outside the US.

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

After a decade, Moskovitz is as excited as ever

Moskovitz seems enthusiastic about the future of his decade-old company.

"Honestly, it's more exciting than ever because the business is taking off," he said. "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."

As for what keeps Moskovitz at the company he created immediately after leaving Facebook in 2008, he told 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 healthcare, education, climate change, any number of nonprofits — 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."

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