Leading collaboration software giant Asana announced on May 28 local time that it has officially completed the acquisition of StackAI, an innovative workflow automation company. The total value of this deal reached $75 million, marking one of Asana's largest moves recently and also a critical step in its transformation toward an AI-native workplace platform. With the completion of the acquisition, the two co-founders of StackAI will officially join the Asana team.

Asana's official statement said that this acquisition will be deeply integrated into its broader AI strategy blueprint. The company's long-term goal is to upgrade its platform into an "operating system for humans and AI agents working together." It is reported that this major news was disclosed to the public during Asana's quarterly earnings call and investor conference held on Thursday afternoon.

As a star project incubated in the Winter 2023 batch of Y Combinator, StackAI focuses on building AI workflow automation tools that can be embedded into existing business systems. It can seamlessly retrieve and integrate data from mainstream office systems such as Salesforce, Slack, and Gsuite. Despite facing intense competition from established automation giants like Zapier as well as top AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic during its growth, StackAI has shown unique commercial value. Before this acquisition, the company had raised nearly $20 million in funding, including a recent $16 million Series A round.

Although the general public usually perceives Asana as a traditional task management system, the company has already built a substantial AI product line in recent years, launching the AI Studio agent builder and the AI Teammates series of pre-built automation tools. Compared to general-purpose tools provided by foundational AI companies, Asana's core advantage lies in its ability to deeply integrate with existing enterprise workflows, thereby extracting business context and training data that other platforms cannot access.

After the surge of generative AI, Asana faced challenges in the public capital market, with its market value shrinking by more than half since the launch of ChatGPT. However, its revenue has continued to grow steadily. With the restructuring of the new management and a firm commitment to "human-AI agent" collaboration products, the company is confident about future performance recovery. Asana's CEO emphasized in a statement that the acquisition of StackAI will significantly shorten the company's R&D cycle, driving the team into a new stage of human-machine collaboration, and in the future, help enterprises achieve end-to-end AI agentization of the most complex business processes.