Asana Acquires StackAI for $75M to Expand No-Code AI Agent Building and Workflow Automation

Asana has acquired the no-code Agent-builder and workflow automation company StackAI for $75 million as part of its broader strategy to become an AI-native workplace platform. The acquisition was announced on Thursday afternoon to coincide with Asana’s earnings and investor call.

StackAI’s founders, Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno, will join Asana following the deal. The startup, which builds AI Agents that operate within existing business systems by pulling data from Salesforce, Slack, and Gsuite, was part of Y Combinator’s Winter ’23 cohort. It has faced intense competition from automation tools like Zapier and AI labs such as OpenAI and anthropic.

According to PitchBook data, StackAI had raised just under $20millionpriortotheacquisition,withmostofthatcomingfromarecent$16 million Series A round. Investors in the round included Gradient, Epakon Capital, Lobby VC, LifeX Ventures, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.

Asana has been expanding its AI capabilities in recent years, launching products such as the AI Studio agent builder and a series of pre-built automations called AI Teammates. While comparable tools exist from major AI labs, Asana believes its deep integration into existing corporate workflows provides a key advantage, offering context and training data that would otherwise be unavailable.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, Asana has struggled on public markets, losing more than half its market capitalization. The deCLIne accelerated with the departure of founder Dustin Moskovitz as CEO in March of the previous year. Nevertheless, the company’s revenue has continued to grow steadily. Under new leadership, CEO Dan Rogers expressed confidence that the company’s human-agent products will drive a rebound.

“This acquisition accelerates our roadmap and takes us into the next phase of human-agent work,” said Rogers in a statement. “We’re already seeing real momentum with AI Teammates and AI Studio … StackAI now lets them go further, agentifying the most complex business processes end-to-end.”

Asana framed the acquisition as a step toward building its platform into “the operating system for human-agent teams.”