Asana, the business productivity platform cofounded by Facebook co-creator Dustin Moskovitz, has raised $50 million in a series E round of funding led by Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm cofounded by Al Gore. Participants in the round included 8VC, Benchmark Capital, Founders Fund, Lead Edge Capital, and World Innovation Lab.
With its $75 million cash injection back in January, the San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of $125 million in 2018 — giving it a $1.5 billion valuation, up from $900 million at its last round.
Task force
Asana is a team-based task-management app founded by Moskovitz and software engineer Justin Rosenstein, who is credited with developing such early Google products as Gmail chat and who helped develop the original Facebook “Like” button. The duo left Facebook in 2008 to kickstart Asana, though the product didn’t launch to the public for another four years. Asana has managed to lure some notable financial backers, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Peter Thiel.
For context, the task-management and team collaboration market is seemingly ripe for investment. Fellow San Francisco-based startup Airtable recently raised a $100 million round, while Monday.com — formerly known as Dapulse — closed a $50 million round.
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Asana has now raised around $210 million in total since its inception, and with another $50 million in the bank it plans to double down on international and enterprise growth.
“As the work management imperative becomes increasingly global, we’re focused on supporting our expanding international team and customer base to meet the growing demand to democratize project management and improve team coordination,” Moskovitz said. “We’re more focused than ever on our vision to enable organizations to align their missions with clarity of plan, purpose, and responsibility so they can focus on the work that matters most.”
Going global
Though Asana has always been available to any company around the world, the company kicked off its international aspirations last year when it elected to expand beyond English for the first time, starting with French and German and followed by Spanish and Portuguese.
According to an Asana spokesperson, 50 percent of its new revenue comes from outside the U.S., which is why it’s continuing to invest in new markets. Asana recently started rolling out in Japanese, and today the company revealed it is now officially launching in Japan with fully localized support, including hiring a local team in Tokyo next year.
Additionally, Asana revealed it is now touching down in Australia, where it will open its first Asana office in Sydney later this month — covering sales and marketing.
In related news, Asana revealed plans to open its first datacenter outside the U.S., with expectations of another in Frankfurt, Germany sometime in early 2019.
