Asana (software)

Asana
Private
Industry Task management
Founded San Francisco, California (2008)
Headquarters San Francisco, CA, United States
Website www.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]

Company history

Moskovitz and Rosenstein left Facebook in 2008[2] to start Asana (named after a Sanskrit word meaning “yoga pose”[3]), which officially launched out of beta in November 2011.[4] 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.[5] 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. According to a New York Times article and someone briefed on the funding, the investors valued the company at $280 million.[6]

As of March 2014, the software product is used by tens of thousands of teams,[7] across all industries and in every continent except Antarctica. Companies that use Asana include Airbnb, Dropbox, Disqus, Foursquare, Pinterest, Stripe, Lets Rent, and Uber.

Product

Asana is a web based solution (SAAS = Software as a service) for the effective collaboration of teams. Main user focus is to plan and manage projects and tasks online without the use of email. The asana workflow: Each team gets a workspace. Workspaces contain projects, and projects contain tasks.

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 hundreds to thousands of employees. 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.[8]

In January 2015 Asana released its native Android app.[9]

Post-email application

In June 2012, Asana announced a new feature called Inbox that aims to help teams minimize the use of email. As one step towards building a “post-email application”,[10] Asana’s Inbox shows “updates to tasks, comments, due date changes, and other status updates people would normally reserve for email.”.[11]

API

In April 2012, Asana released its API to third-party developers. The API is available for free to everyone with an Asana account and can be accessed through their developer site. Asana is integrated with several popular productivity tools including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Harvest, and Instagantt, Jira, Zendesk, among others.[12] The complete list can be found on their apps page.

Pricing

Asana is free for teams of up to 15 people with unlimited projects and tasks. 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.

See also

References

External links