Asana Gets $9 Million in Venture Capital
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Daniel Cawrey in News
The Wall Street Journal is reporting in its print edition that two founders of Facebook recently were awarded $9 million in funding for their new venture called Asana. Although this is newsworthy due to the amount of investment, the real kicker is that the pair, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, are not discussing what exactly their freshly capitalized business will be doing. Our intuition is that the company, which received lead funding from Benchmark Capital with support from Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, is going to launch a web-only application that is going to help businesses with their productivity.
All jokes aside about these two on a mission to pay back the world for all the lost time workers spend on the job surfing Facebook, Asana and its funding is could likely be a response to the November 19 preview and source code release of Chrome OS , showing off what Google plans to bring to market in 2010. The target customers for Asana’s purported web app will probably be small and midsize businesses that are looking for low cost, flexible software that helps their businesses grow.
Rosenstein, per an interview with Rafe Needleman of CNET said, “We started Asana to change the way people manage information, and speed up work by an order of magnitude.” As well as helping people become, “vastly more productive,”.
Asana, which ironically is a Sanskrit word that refers to something static, will be something that is light and responsive which would fit perfectly with the Chrome mission. We’ll keep an eye on this one and post updates when we learn more about exactly what Asana plans to do and how we think it relates to the Chrome OS.
