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Asana, Inc.

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asana
Company typePrivate
IndustryTask management
FoundedSan Francisco, California (2008)
FounderDustin Moskovitz
Justin Rosenstein Edit this on Wikidata
Headquarters
San Francisco, CA
,
United States
Websitewww.asana.com

Asana (/əˈsɑːnə/) is a web and mobile application designed to enable teamwork without email. It was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook.[1]

Asana’s stated mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.[2]

Company and History

Moskovitz and Rosenstein left Facebook in 2008[3] to start Asana (named after a Sanskrit word meaning “yoga pose”[4]), which officially launched out of beta in November 2011.[5] The company announced that they had closed a $1.2 million angel round in the spring of 2011 from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile Jed Stremel, followed by a $9 million USD series A-round in investment led by Benchmark Capital in late November 2011.[6] On July 23, 2012, Asana announced a new round of funding — Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, along with existing investors Benchmark, Andreessen-Horowitz, and Mitch Kapor, have invested $28 million in Asana; Thiel also joined Asana's Board of Directors.[7] According to a New York Times article and someone briefed on the funding, the investors valued the company at $280 million.[8]

As of March 2014, the software product is used by tens of thousands of teams,[9] across all industries and in every continent except Antarctica. Companies that use Asana include Airbnb, Dropbox, Disqus, Foursquare, Pinterest, Stripe, and Uber.

Product

Asana is a teamwork communication manager. The product supports many features, including workspaces, projects, tasks, tags, notes, comments, and an inbox that organizes and updates information in real-time.[10] The product is designed to enable individuals and teams to plan and manage their projects and tasks without email. Each team gets a workspace. Workspaces contain projects, and projects contain tasks.[11]

In each task, users can add notes, comments, attachments, and tags. Users can follow projects and tasks, and, when the state of a project or task changes, followers get updates about the changes in their inboxes.

In May 2013, Asana launched Organizations, which enables companies to adopt Asana at enterprise scale: from 100s to 1000s of employees.[12] With the launch of Organizations came new capabilities including an Asana Team Browser, a unified view of a person's My Tasks and inbox, employee auto-join and IT administration abilities related to provisioning and permissions.[13][14]

Post-email application

In June 2012, Asana announced a new feature called Inbox that aims to help teams minimize the use of email.[15] As one step towards building a “post-email application”,[16] Asana’s Inbox shows “updates to tasks, comments, due date changes, and other status updates people would normally reserve for email.”[17] In a recent news article, Justin Rosenstein said, “We wanted to build a holistic solution from the ground up that replaces what we do with email.”[18]

API

In April 2012, Asana released its API[19] to third-party developers. The API is available for free to everyone with an Asana account and can be accessed through their developer site.[20] Asana is integrated with several popular productivity tools including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Harvest, and Instagantt, Jira, Zendesk, among others.[21] The complete list can be found on their apps page.

Pricing

Asana is free for teams of up to 15 people. Asana Premium plans are paid versions of the product for larger teams or entire organizations. Pricing is tiered based on the number of people within the team or organization.

Competitors

See also

References

  1. ^ Guynn, Jessica (2 November 2011). "Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz unveils new company, Asana". Los Angeles Times.
  2. ^ "Our Mission".
  3. ^ Guynn, Jessica (3 October 2008). "Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz leaves for start-up". Los Angeles Times.
  4. ^ Vance, Ashlee (2 November 2011). "Asana: Dustin and Justin's Quest for Flow". BusinessWeek.
  5. ^ Guynn, Jessica (2 November 2011). "Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz unveils new company, Asana". Los Angeles Times.
  6. ^ Schonfeld, Erick (24 November 2009). "Facebook Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz Raises $9 million For New Collaboration Startup, Asana". TechCrunch.
  7. ^ Moskovitz, Moskovitz. "Asana, Peter Thiel, and Founders Fund".
  8. ^ Cain Miller (23 July 2012). "Asana Raises Money to Save the World by Saving Time". The New York Times.
  9. ^ Dishman, Lydia. "How Extreme Transparency Can Make Your Team Its Most Productive".
  10. ^ "The First Post-Email Application".
  11. ^ "The First Post-Email Application".
  12. ^ Van Zant, Kenny. "Organizations in Asana". Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  13. ^ Hardy, Quentin (1 May 2013). "Re-Re-engineering the Corporation". NewYorkTimes.
  14. ^ Van Zant, Kenny. "Organizations in Asana". Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  15. ^ Kaplan, Dan. "Announcing Inbox: A Step Towards A Post-Email World". Retrieved 27 June 2012.
  16. ^ O'Dell, Jolie (27 June 2012). "Death to email! And meetings, too. Asana's new inbox takes aim at "work about work"". VentureBeat.
  17. ^ Hamburger, Ellis (27 June 2012). "With big Asana update, Facebook co-founder Moskovitz wants to kill email". The Verge.
  18. ^ Hamburger, Ellis (27 June 2012). "With big Asana update, Facebook co-founder Moskovitz wants to kill email". The Verge.
  19. ^ Slovacek, Greg. "Announcing the Asana API". Retrieved 19 April 2012.
  20. ^ "The Asana API".
  21. ^ "The tools you use, integrated with Asana".
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