Recently Listed Asana has an API Focused Strategy

According to IDC, the markets for collaborative applications and project and portfolio management are expected to grow from $23 billion in 2020 to $32 billion in 2023. Work management platform Asana recently went public via a direct listing that valued it at $5.5 billion. 

Asana’s Offerings

San Francisco-based Asana was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Google and Facebook alumnus Justin Rosenstein. While at Facebook, they saw the coordination challenges the company faced as it scaled. They recognized the pain of work about work for teams to coordinate effectively and were inspired to create Asana to solve this problem.

Asana provides a work management platform that enables individuals and teams to get work done faster while improving employee engagement by allowing everyone to see how their work—whether it is a task, process, project, or portfolio of projects—connects to the broader mission of an organization.

During the second quarter, Asana launched Asana Goals which allows teams to connect company goals with OKRs and the work to support them in one place.

Asana’s Competition

Asana operates in a highly competitive landscape. Its competitors include companies specifically offering work management solutions such as Smartsheet (annual revenue of $270.9 million and market cap of $6.6 billion) and monday.com; companies offering productivity suites such as Microsoft and Google; and companies specializing in vertical solutions such as Atlassian (annual revenue of $1.6 billion and market cap of $48 billion).

Asana’s API Focused Strategy

Asana’s cloud-native platform includes proprietary software services built on top of infrastructure provided by AWS. It follows an API focused strategy. The Asana platform integrates with over 100 third-party applications including Microsoft apps such as Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Power Automate; G-suite apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Chrome, Sheets, and Drive; functional tools such as Salesforce and Adobe Creative Cloud; communication apps such as Slack; file sharing apps such as Box and Dropbox; development apps such as GitHub and Jira; and reporting apps such as Tableau. The company recently announced Asana for Microsoft Teams integration which enables conversations in Teams to be linked directly to Asana projects.

Asana’s Financials

Asana’s revenues were $76.8 million and $142.6 million for fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2020, respectively, representing growth of 86%. Net loss was $50.9 million and $118.6 million for fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2020, respectively, As of January 31, 2020, it had over 1.2 million paid users.

For the second quarter of fiscal 2021, Asana reported revenue of $52 million, up 57%. GAAP net loss was $41.1 million, compared to GAAP net loss of $15.6 million a year ago. Non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.34, compared to non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.20 a year ago.

It ended the quarter with over 82,000 paying customers. The number of customers spending $5,000 or more an annualized basis grew to 7,933, an increase of 65%. The number of customers spending $50,000 or more on an annualized basis grew to 283, an increase of 160%.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2021, the company expects revenues of $53.5 million to $54.5 million, or growth of 40% to 43%. Non-GAAP net loss per share is expected to be $0.38 to $0.36.

For the full fiscal year 2021, Asana expects revenues of $210 million to $213 million, or a growth of 47% to 49%. Non-GAAP net loss per share is expected to be $1.33 to $1.30.

Prior to going public, Asana had raised $213 million in funding from investors including Generation Investment Management, Founders Fund, 8VC, Lead Edge Capital, World Innovation Lab, Benchmark Capital Advisory UK, Y Combinator, and Manhattan Venture Partners. Its last funding round was held in November 2018 when it raised $50 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

Asana went public on September 30 on the NYSE under the ticker ASAN at an opening price of $27 and closed at $28.8. The NYSE had set a reference price of $21 a share for the stock. Its stock is currently trading at $24.96 with a market cap of $3.86 billion.