Asana Raises $50M In Latest Investment Round

One of the best innovations in the connected internet revolution has got to be the way that companies can tap into the greatest workforce possible, regardless of geography. Telecommuting is allowing even the smallest startup to reach team members literally anywhere around the planet, giving them a manpower edge that many new companies didn’t have even ten years ago.

But whether a company’s team works together in the same office or is scattered across three continents and eight different time zones, there is a fundamental problem with any group effort: real-time, secure communication.

That’s where the rise in popularity in collaborative software comes in, and one of the names at the forefront is Asana. Founded by two well-known names in digital engineering–one of them a co-founder of Facebook–Asana was named one of the top twenty collaborative software options by business software group Capterra, and has already grabbed some major name customers like Zappos, Facebook, Groupon, and more.

How many more? Around 13,000 different paying subscribers, all connecting on projects ranging from the frivolous to the closely guarded game changer.

In a recent blog post, the founders explained why their focus on a streamlined workflow product was so crucial: because there wasn’t anything reliably useful when they needed it in previous jobs:

“Asana has been our attempt to solve the pain of work about work, letting organizations easily achieve their goals, or take on bigger ones. We call that solution ‘work tracking,’ software that manages who’s responsible for what by when, and generally serves as the source of truth for everything a team is working on. We—now a team of 186 people—have collectively invested so much love and hard work into this attempt, it’s hard to articulate how gratifying it feels to step back and see that it’s actually…working.”

One goal for the new investment series is to work on creating a “bigger is better” version of the current application. While most people think of a narrowly focused team working through software like Asana, the company already has several large-base clients with very broad needs. Zappos uses the software across its entire company, not just within one group, like product development. An article on Asana’s recent Series C investment also cited city governments that are using Asana to replace the old inter-office email system, meaning the entire city workforce is connected through this software.