Asana

Asana is a San Francisco software company whose web and mobile work management platform lets teams create projects, assign tasks, set deadlines and track goals. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, who had built an internal productivity tool called Tasks at Facebook, left to start Asana in 2008. The product came out of beta in November 2011 and launched commercially in April 2012. Its 2020 registration statement reported more than 75,000 paying customers and 1.2 million paid users.

Benchmark was an early backer: its fund held 14.0 million Class B shares at the time of the listing, and Benchmark partner Matt Cohler sat on the board as the Series A holders' representative. Founders Fund led a $28 million Series B in 2012 at a $280 million valuation. In March 2016 Sam Altman led a $50 million Series C at a $600 million valuation, joined by 8VC and Founders Fund. Generation Investment Management led a $75 million Series D in January 2018, and in November 2018 Asana raised a $50 million Series E led by Generation with Lead Edge Capital and World Innovation Lab at a $1.5 billion valuation, bringing equity raised to $213 million. In 2020 Moskovitz's trust also bought $450 million of mandatory convertible notes.

Asana listed on the New York Stock Exchange on September 30, 2020 under the ticker ASAN through a direct listing, selling no new shares. Against a $21 reference price the stock opened at $27 and closed its first day at $28.80, a fully diluted valuation of about $5.5 billion. The company reported $99.7 million of revenue for the six months to July 31, 2020. In March 2025 Moskovitz announced his retirement as chief executive, and Dan Rogers took over as CEO in July 2025 with Moskovitz remaining chairman. In May 2026 Asana bought StackAI for $75 million.

Asana illustrates a founder-funded company that used outside capital sparingly. It raised roughly $213 million of venture equity over a decade, while its founder later supplied larger amounts through convertible notes. Benchmark, which entered at the Series A, owned about 10.4 percent of the Class B stock before listing, followed by Generation at 7.2 percent and Founders Fund at 6.5 percent. The direct listing let those holders reach liquidity roughly 11 years after founding without an underwritten offering, an early example of that route alongside Spotify, Slack and Palantir.