Asana, a corporate software unicorn started by a Facebook Inc. co-founder, filed to go public via a direct listing, disclosing a net loss that has more than doubled year over year along with growing revenue.
The San Francisco-based startup filed paperwork for the listing Monday. Unlike a traditional initial public offering, no new money is raised in a direct listing, which usually sees existing investors start selling their stock as soon as trading starts with no lockup period.
Asana reported a net loss of $36 million in the three months through April on revenue of $48 million. That compared to a loss of $15 million on revenue of $28 million in the same period a year earlier.
The company, which makes workplace productivity software, was started by Facebook Inc. co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. As of Jan. 31, Asana had more than 3.2 million activated accounts and over 1.2 million paid users, according to the filing.
Asana said its business could further benefit from the shift to work from home. “Distributed and remote teams can use Asana as a single, real-time plan of record, reducing the need for messaging threads and video calls to coordinate work,” it said.
Like Facebook, Asana has two classes of stock, Class A and Class B. The shares being resold in the direct listing are Class A shares, and each is entitled to one vote. Each Class B gets 10 votes. Just as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the biggest holder of Facebook’s powerful Class B shares, Moskovitz (who remains a key Facebook shareholder) has more of Asana’s Class B shares than anyone else.
The company could have raised money through a more traditional initial public offering but chose a direct listing, which was popularized by Spotify in 2018 and circumvents investment banks in share sales.
