(Bloomberg) -- Asana Inc., a task management software startup founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, raised $50 million in venture funding, which it plans to use to open new data centers and offices overseas.
The funding, which Moskovitz said values the company at $1.5 billion, was led by Al Gore's Generation Investment Management. That's the same lead investor as Asana's most recent $75 million round in January, when the 10-year-old startup was valued at $900 million.
The main product at Asana is its productivity software, which now has 50,000 paying teams and another 1 million using a free version. The software helps teams assign and monitor different tasks to work on complex projects. Asana's leaders also encourage a culture inside the San Francisco-based company with values like equanimity and mindfulness. Moskovitz, its chief executive officer, said that Generation is a particularly well-fitting investor because it values not just revenue growth, but the ways companies invest in their employees and how they plan to expand over long periods of time.
The round included existing investors Founders Fund, 8VC and Benchmark, and new investors Lead Edge Capital and World Innovation Lab.
The new funding will help Asana build out projects such as a data center planned for Frankfurt, a new office in Sydney, and a local team in Tokyo. And being valued above the billion-dollar “unicorn” mark isn't bad either, Moskovitz said.
“I think this is a really nice way to be crossing it – not like we just reached it or had weird deal terms to get over the line, but we're really well past it,” he said. “That's how I'm characterizing it internally. Yes, it's a milestone, but it's one step on a long journey. The goal is to build something 10 or 100 times bigger than this.”
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Pollack at apollack1@bloomberg.net, Mark Milian
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