Asana has acquired workflow automation company StackAI for $75 million. This is part of a larger effort to position itself as an AI-native workplace platform. StackAI founders Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno will join Asana as part of the acquisition.
Asana positioned the acquisition as part of a broader AI axis, building its platform into an “operating system for human-agent teams.”
The announcement was made Thursday afternoon in conjunction with Asana’s earnings and investor call.
Built as an AI workflow automation system, StackAI ingests data from systems like Salesforce, Slack, and Gsuite and designs agents that work within your existing business systems. The company, which is part of Y Combinator’s Winter ’23 cohort, faces stiff competition from automation tools like Zapier and AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
StackAI has raised just under $20 million, most of it in a recent $16 million Series A round, according to PitchBook data. The round included funding from Gradient, Epakon Capital, Lobby VC, LifeX Ventures, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.
While users are probably best known for Asana’s work management system, the company has released a number of AI-oriented products in recent years, including the AI Studio agent builder and the AI Teammates series of pre-built automations. While comparable tools are available from major labs, Asana believes a key advantage is that it is deeply integrated into existing enterprise workflows, allowing us to extract context and training data that would otherwise be unavailable.
Asana has struggled in the public markets in the AI era, losing more than half of its market capitalization since the introduction of ChatGPT, a spiral that worsened when founder Dustin Moskowitz stepped down as CEO last March. However, revenues continue to grow steadily, and the new management team is confident that its human agent products can turn things around.
“This acquisition accelerates our roadmap and allows us to take the next phase of human and agent work,” CEO Dan Rogers said in a statement. “We’re already seeing real momentum with AI Teammates and AI Studio, and now StackAI has evolved even further to enable end-to-end agentization of the most complex business processes.”
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