According to a recent report by Global Industry Analysts, the global market for cloud-based productivity software is expected to grow to $42 billion by 2024 driven by workforce decentralization and the emergence of borderless organizations. Billion Dollar Unicorn Asana is a leading player in the industry that is expected to go public this year.

Asana’s Offerings

San Francisco-based Asana was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Google and Facebook alumnus Justin Rosenstein. The two worked together at Facebook where they were working on improving the productivity of employees. After founding Facebook, Moskowitz was appointed Facebook’s Vice President of Engineering where he found himself spending more time trying to manage the growing number of new employees. He discussed these issues with his colleague Rosenstein and decided to come up with ways for teams to collaborate. They built an in-house offering Task that helped Facebook employees break out their project into smaller tasks that were easier to track. In 2008, the two left Facebook to address the project full-time on their own.

They began building work productivity and collaboration tools for organizations and released Asana. Asana is a Web task manager that lets teams manage their workflow by breaking projects into tasks. It has been designed to help employees work together by becoming the single place where everyone can see what their colleagues are working on and get progress reports on projects.

Asana’s Financials

Asana was launched as a free service. Today, it still operates a freemium model allowing small teams and individuals to use its basic features of task listing, calendar and project assignment, and schedules for free. In 2012, it launched a paid version of the service which added other premium features. Its subscription ranges from $9.99 per user per month to $19.99 per user per month. Paid for features include abilities like building timelines, portfolios, milestone tracking, and task dependencies. It also offers an enterprise level subscription for bigger organizations.

Asana is currently privately held and does not disclose its financials. Reports suggest that revenues had reached $60-$90 million in 2017. According to market reports, Asana was expected to turn profitable last year and has over 50,000 paid customers.

Asana’s product offering has managed to attract several investors. It has raised $213 million in funding so far from investors including Generation Investment Management, Founders Fund, 8VC, Lead Edge Capital, World Innovation Lab, Benchmark Capital Advisory UK, and Founders Fund. Its last funding round was held in November last year when it raised $50 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Its valuation has been growing rapidly considering that an earlier round held in January last year had valued Asana at $900 million. It is still a far cry from the $100 billion target that the company had targeted for itself a few years ago.

Asana plans to use the newly acquired funds for international and product expansion. It is targeting to open an AWS-based data center in Frankfurt this year and will establish offices in the Asia-Pacific markets to drive expansion in these regions. Within the product innovation, Asana is working on adding machine learning and predictive and other AI capabilities into its product to make it more intelligent for the organizations.

Asana has been driving enterprise collaboration through an API strategy. Asana’s API is a platform to ensure all information is up to date and that teams stay efficient. The API allows developers to use software and scripts to read information from inside Asana, input information from outside Asana, and automatically react when things change. They can create functionality to perform repetitive or tedious tasks, design workflow to react to changes, create reports, remain in sync with other collaboration software such as Slack or Salesforce, and customize Asana for individual teams. Asana is using these APIs to build a flexible and powerful tool that can be intuitive enough for all teams to adopt and manage while driving efficiency.