Asana Buys No Code Agent Builder StackAI for $75 Million
Asana has acquired StackAI, a no-code AI agent builder, for $75 million, marking a significant step in the project management company’s push to become what it calls “the operating system for human-agent teams.” The deal was announced Thursday to coincide with Asana’s earnings and investor call.
StackAI was built as an AI workflow automation system, designing agents that operate within existing business systems by pulling data from tools like Salesforce, Slack, and Google Suite. The startup was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 cohort and had raised just under $20 million total, including a $16 million Series A round backed by Gradient, Epakon Capital, Lobby VC, LifeX Ventures, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.
With Asana acquiring StackAI, the company is making a clear bet on deep workflow integration as its edge over competing automation tools like Zapier and AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic. StackAI’s co-founders, Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno, will join Asana as part of the deal.
Asana CEO Dan Rogers framed the move as acceleration, not experimentation. “This acquisition accelerates our roadmap and takes us into the next phase of human-agent work,” Rogers said in a statement. “StackAI now lets them go further, agentifying the most complex business processes end-to-end.”
The acquisition builds on existing products including AI Teammates and AI Studio, Asana’s in-house agent builder. The company’s argument is that its embeddedness in corporate workflows gives it access to context and training data that general-purpose AI labs simply cannot match.
Asana has lost more than half its market cap since ChatGPT’s launch, a slide worsened by the departure of founder Dustin Moskovitz as CEO last March. Revenue has continued to grow, however, and new leadership is pushing the human-agent strategy as its path back to relevance in the AI era.
The Asana acquires StackAI deal signals that enterprise software companies are increasingly willing to pay a premium to bring AI agent capabilities in-house rather than build them from scratch.
