Asana raises $75M Series D round led by Generation Investment Management

The problem I have with products like Asana has always been context. It’s just too much hassle for businesses with very unique processes, often requiring something more custom built, and of course, a deep introspection of data.

Productivity apps in Silicon Valley startups are out of control. My wife's company has Slack, G Suite, JIRA, Facebook at Work, Zugata, and now getting Asana. If you need to ping someone, you have to ping them in Slack, Hangouts, FB Messenger and hope they respond to one.

&gt;“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.“<p>I worked in many companies previously where Asana was used. I can tell you with sheer confidence, at no point did we feel the &quot;help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.&quot; part. Not once, not ever.<p>Every time we used it, the project managers would love it for the first two weeks and they would simply revert back to email&#x2F;slack for reminding teams of deadlines or deliverables.<p>But you know what REALLY helped out the most? Unsexy Excel sheets combined with regular checkin meetings. We would have ONE meeting every Monday morning where we would review our excel sheet for everyone&#x27;s progress, updates and deliverables.<p>Heck, I think even Trello works much better than the god awful interface that Asana has. But, Asana has never worked for any of the teams I&#x27;ve worked with in the past, irrespective of the company size. Maybe that&#x27;s just me.

$75M... for what??! Call me sceptic but I just don&#x27;t understand how they can raise that kind of money. There is just nothing special about Asana. Is it purely fuelled by amazing growth? And What is the exit strategy here? An acquisition by Atlassian?<p>Meanwhile, I am bootstrapping and dreaming of launching and making a few $K or hundreds of $K. Maybe I am not ambitious enough when there seem to be so much &quot;free&quot; money up for grabs.

Congratulations to Asana.<p>Let&#x27;s celebrate their success rather than criticize their software.<p>Everybody here would probably be very happy to have created a company like this. Why be so negative?

I&#x27;m happy for Asana as I find the core product useful, but I do wonder how much more growth is possible without branching out into other product areas. Hopefully they&#x27;ve got some interesting stuff in the pipeline.

30,000 paying customers after 6 years. How much do they make from each customer, $100?<p>That&#x27;s $3M revenue per year justifying a $30M valuation at the high end. How do they come up with $1B with slow growth like that? Is it because they have a famous founding team? Seems like a small startup with little growth potential, who can raise any money they want anyway, because their founders are billionaires.<p>Not hating on that, but how do they think of paying back their investors. Is this an ego thing, that they think they MUST build a billion dollar startup even though their revenue and growth is tiny?

~$163M project management software. [0]<p>Last round valued at $600M. [1]<p>Any guess what this round is valued at? Unicorn?<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;asana" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;asana</a><p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;task-management-app-asana-raises-50m-at-a-600m-valuation-led-by-ycs-sam-altman&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;task-management-app-asana-...</a>

“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.“ I’ve tried the product and if that was their mission I couldn’t tell. Trying to force some sort of higher purpose into every company seems disingenuous at best. Seems like a stretch for an impact investment firm.

Personally, I prefer a whiteboard kanban made up of post-its over any work organization software. When remote workers are involved, then I reach for Trello.<p>Communication tools are a different matter, but generally, a mindful email culture seems to work well.

Ha, I&#x27;ve tried to use this product with 3 different teams, never caught on - ended up mostly syncing up via Slack+Email+Google Docs.<p>Anyone here been able to get a team to use Asana?

Asana reminds me of that saying that there are only software that people love to hate and those that nobody has heard of, Asana has been reliably bad when I used it, this in a humourous way confirms it.

I don&#x27;t usually complain &quot;what the heck are they doing with that kind of money.&quot; But, from a cursory look, Asana seems to be one of the most functionally simple Project Management software I have seen. I know it&#x27;s trite to undermine the complexity of software, but in this case, I can&#x27;t find many reasons why they need that kind of money. What are they doing that necessitates a big team (251-500 employees)? The software isn&#x27;t handling massive amounts of data. Its complexity seems comparable to Trello, which raised only $10M (&lt;7% of Asana&#x27;s total funding) [1].<p>How are they burning this amount of cash? Am I missing something?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;trello" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;trello</a>

Facebook billionaire funds his own company and gets his friend’s companies to use it at work.

I think it&#x27;s a great product. It saddens me that they need to keep raising funds, in theory this should be a business that works. There&#x27;s companies offering products that add questionable value and can be highly profitable, especially in finance and around real estate.

Site Down?<p>Edit: Backup now. When the Story was posted here, site was down.