Asana Purchases No-Code Agent Development Platform StackAI

Asana has completed the acquisition of StackAI, a workflow automation company, for $75 million, as part of its initiative to become an AI-driven workplace platform. Following the acquisition, StackAI’s founders, Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno, will be joining Asana.

This acquisition is aligned with Asana’s broader aim of enhancing its AI capabilities, with the goal of transforming its platform into “the operating system for human-agent teams.”

The announcement was made Thursday afternoon, coinciding with Asana’s earnings report and investor call.

StackAI functions as an AI workflow-automation solution that creates agents designed to operate within current business frameworks, incorporating data from platforms like Salesforce, Slack, and Gsuite. Having participated in Y Combinator’s Winter ’23 cohort, StackAI has faced competition from automation tools such as Zapier, as well as AI research entities like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The firm secured nearly $20 million in funding, notably from a recent Series A round of $16 million, with support from investors like Gradient, Epaklon Capital, Lobby VC, LifeX Ventures, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, as per PitchBook data.

Although Asana is largely known for its task management platform, it has rolled out various AI-centric offerings in recent years, including the AI Studio agent builder and a set of AI Teammates automations. While similar technologies exist from larger organizations, Asana asserts that its close integration with business workflows provides a substantial edge, capturing context and training data that may otherwise remain unavailable.

Despite encountering challenges in the public markets during the AI surge—losing more than half its market cap since the launch of ChatGPT, along with founder Dustin Moskovitz’s resignation from the CEO role last March—Asana has maintained steady revenue growth, and current leadership is hopeful that their human-agent solutions will support a recovery.

“This acquisition accelerates our roadmap and leads us into the next phase of human-agent work,” stated CEO Dan Rogers. “We are already seeing significant progress with AI Teammates and AI Studio… StackAI enables us to enhance agent capabilities across the most complex business processes from beginning to end.”