Asana raises $50 million from Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and others

Task management software startup Asana is announcing today a $50 million round of funding. Several known entities in the technology industry are participating in the new round, which is led by Y Combinator president Sam Altman.

Other investors in the round include Joe Lonsdale’s 8 VC, Tony Hsieh’s VTF Capital, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Andrew Mason, Roger McNamee, Adam D’Angelo, Founders Fund, Eric Ries, Divesh Makan, Ruchi Sanghvi, and Aditya Agrawal. Asana founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein also participated.

“This capital will help fuel the next two years of the company to help us make work tracking more pervasive across the world, make Asana easier and more powerful for both small teams and giant companies, and continue striving to build the best team and culture for the work at hand,” Moskovitz and Rosenstein wrote in a blog post. They predicted that the startup should be profitable within the next few years.

Asana helps teams of employees track who’s doing what — along the lines of Trello, Wrike, Basecamp, and Microsoft’s recently acquired Wunderlist, among others. But the hot new thing is team communication, with apps like Slack making it possible for many people to collaborate and talk. This is not unlike enterprise social networks such as Microsoft’s Yammer, Atlassian’s HipChat, and VMware’s Socialcast.

Asana says its monthly and annual recurring revenue are more than doubling each year. The startup was founded in 2009 and last raised money in 2012.

Asana launched a major redesign in September. Since then, the startup says it’s taken on more than 3,000 paying customers.

Sam Altman has a blog post on his investment here.