Facebook co-founder’s Asana raises $9 million from Benchmark, Andreessen-Horowitz
Asana, the productivity management startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Muskovitz and lead engineer Justin Rosenstein, has raked in $9 million from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz.
Asana is probably one of the more anticipated startups in Silicon Valley right now. Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes founded Facebook together during college at Harvard University. Rosenstein was another early Facebook employee. The pair are trying to re-imagine productivity management in a way that’s completely native to the web and overcomes many of the problems associated with other mediums like e-mail.
They went with two of the Valley’s best-known firms — Benchmark Capital has funded Twitter, eBay and Red Hat and Andreessen-Horowitz is the new fund from Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The new round is specifically to attract the best engineering talent around: Asana boasts perks like in-house yoga, organic homecooked meals and $10,000 to set up your workspace any way you want.
That’s not to diminish some of the technical infrastructure the company has built to underpin their product. While the pair didn’t say much about the look or feel of what they’re building, they did talk a bit about the some of the underlying technology. They haven’t released a time-line for when they’ll demo the product.
“We’re building a new kind of end-to-end system for developing web applications at literally an order of magnitude faster than is possible today,” said Rosenstein. “It’s fundamentally groundbreaking technology that involves many different kinds of problems in software engineering and computer science from infrastructure, algorithms and database work to programming languages and compilers.”
Rosenstein said the new programming system, called Lunascript after Moskovitz’ cat, eliminates a lot of the grunt work involved in software engineering.
“When you’re programming, there’s a lot of work that’s really quite repetitive and rote which we ended up doing over and over again,” Rosenstein said. “We’ve created a new kind of programming system that allows a developer to express the essence and intent of the application and handles that other 90 percent of the rote, repetitive work for them.”
As for the product itself, it’s productivity management software that can be applied to anything from managing engineering work to personal tasks. The company uses it to handle development on the product.
The company name’s, Asana, comes from yoga, which they require all employees to do twice a week. Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who knew the pair from his days as an early executive at Facebook, joins Asana’s board.
