Asana acquires no-code agent-builder Stack AI

Asana has acquired the workflow automation company Stack AI, the company announced on Thursday after market closed, part of a larger effort to position itself as an AI-native workplace platform. Stack AI’s founders, Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno, will join Asana as part of the acquisition. The company declined to share financial terms of the deal.

Asana framed the acquisition as part of its broader AI pivot, in which it tries to transform its platform into “the operating system for human-agent teams.”

The announcement was timed to coincide with Asana’s earnings and investor call.

Built as an AI workflow-automation system, Stack AI designs agents to operate within existing business systems, pulling in data from Salesforce, Slack, Goggle Workspace, and other systems. The startup, which was part of Y Combinator’s Winter ’23 cohort, has faced fierce competition from automation tools like Zapier as well as AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Stack AI had raised just under $20 million, according to Pitchbook data, with most of it coming in a recent $16 million Series A round. That round included funding from Gradient, Epaklon Capital, Lobby VC, LifeX Ventures, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.

While users are likely most familiar with Asana’s work management system, the company has released a number of AI-oriented products in recent years, most notably the AI Studio agent builder and AI Teammates series of pre-built automations. While equivalent tools are available from major labs, Asana sees its deep integration into existing corporate workflows as a key advantage, allowing it to distill context and training data that would otherwise be unavailable.

Asana has struggled in the public markets during the AI era, losing more than half its market cap value since the introduction of ChatGPT — a spiral that grew worse with the departure of founder Dustin Moskovitz as CEO last March. But revenues have continued to grow steadily, and the new leadership is confident that its new human-agent products will enable it to rebound.

“This acquisition accelerates our roadmap and takes us into the next phase of human-agent work,” said CEO Dan 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.”