Asana IPO: Date, Stock Price & Complete Review

Not all companies worth investing in trade on one of the stock exchanges such as NYSE or Nasdaq. But a company’s leaders may decide to get listed at some point and start trading shares on the open market. This is known as initial public offering, or IPO. IPOs are great for companies who want to gain exposure to the open market, improve liquidity and help the company grow by attracting more capital. It also gives early investors the opportunity to trade shares and easily cash in on their investment.

Even successful, established businesses can remain private for decades or never go public. Asana was a private company for 12 years and finally decided to go public in 2020.

IPOs are known as a great way for investors to make a big profit in a relatively short time or ride the wave of a company’s success from the very start if they believe in the company’s long-term success.

Read on to find out about Asana stock IPO and all the important details about Asana IPO 2020.

Asana History

Before we look at the Asana IPO, let’s first talk a bit about the company's history. Asana is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) productivity tool for managing tasks, projects and team collaboration. The SaaS model means that customers pay a monthly fee instead of buying the software outright. This is a popular choice for many top web services and apps as it provides regular, recurring income from their paying customers.

Asana was founded in 2008 by two Facebook employees, Dustin Moskovitz (a FB cofounder and Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard) and Justin Rosenstein after leaving Facebook, where they worked on employee productivity. They were frustrated with the amount of busywork everyone had to do instead of focusing on valuable things.

Four years later, in 2012, the company launched their product on the market. By 2018 the company had 50,000 paying customers and $1.5 billion in valuation.

Asana is one of the top productivity tools on the market alongside Hive, Basecamp, Monday and many others. If you’re an Asana user, you might be wondering “is Asana publicly traded?” because you might be interested in investing in the company.

The word asana comes from the Sanskrit word for yoga pose. The application is focused on simplicity and ease of use. Most customers say the service helps them to increase team accountability and meet deadlines, communicate about work and gain clarity on their goals.

The service operates on a freemium model, there is a free plan for individuals and teams under 15 people, and 3 tiers of premium plans: premium, business and enterprise with levels of functionality, features, and customizations.

Asana has a market cap of $23.45 billion, 25th largest in the software sector.

Asana’s Public Listing Key Data and IPO Date

Let’s look at the Asana IPO date and price, its IPO process as well as other key information about their public offering.

Asana IPO Date: September 30, 2020
Ticker: ASAN
Exchange: NYSE
Reference share price: $21
First trade: $27
Valuation at IPO: $2.5 billion
‍CEO: Dustin Moskovitz
Category: Software
Method: Direct listing

Asana stock IPO date was September 30, 2020, when the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the ticker ASAN.

Asana chose to enter the stock exchange through a traditional IPO—a direct listing as opposed to going public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which has been popular with new IPOs in recent years. SPACs are companies created for the purpose of merging several companies that wish to go public. This makes the process of IPO cheaper and more simple.

The Asana IPO price opened at $27 and closed at $28.80 on the first day, reaching a valuation of $4.3 billion. The stock price was hovering around this mark for the first two months and even went down slightly, but the stock started growing in the second half of November and reached $41.42 on February 19, 2021.

A year later, on September 23, 2021 the price was already at $124, which is close to the stock’s current price of $133 (as of November 16, 2021). So, although the stock didn’t grow rapidly at the time of the IPO, it grew 430% year over year since Asana going public. Thus, Dustin Moskovitz, who owns a 2.34% stake in Facebook and was already named as the youngest self-made billionaire in 2011, increased his net worth to $24.6 billion.

So What About Investing Now?

Asana’s business is doing well. The company has a 56% market share in the category of marketing planning. Asana has over 93,000 paying customers as well as millions of free users in virtually every country of the world—190 out of 195. The paying customers generated a revenue of $227 million in the 2020-2021 fiscal year, an increase of 59% from last year. Despite the rising revenue, the company is not profitable yet and has a long way to go before breaking even. This is normal for new companies because they can rely on investment capital and reinvest everything back into their business for the long-term, they can focus on their growth without having to pay taxes on their profits.

So most analysts give this stock a buy or hold rating, and we happen to agree. IPOs can be a great way of getting a quick return on your investment, but the most important thing is investing in things you believe in. If you’re an Asana user, you will love to hold this stock and watch it grow in years to come.

Even though the Asana IPO date is gone, feel free to check out our IPO section to look at other scheduled IPOs. If you want to find companies that match your interests, investment goals and portfolio, try Gainy for some great IPO investment ideas as well as a variety of other assets.

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