Asana Files for Direct Listing Amid Slew of Software IPOs

25 Aug 2020, 09:34 AM IST

(Bloomberg) -- Asana Inc., a corporate software maker 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.

Asana has recently been trading on the secondary market at a value of around $5 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg this month. The secondary market valuation is an important element of a company’s price discovery process in a direct listing, since no new shares are sold. Its largest shareholders include Benchmark Capital, Al Gore’s Generation IM fund and entities affiliated with Founders Fund.

Asana plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The NYSE, a subsidiary of InterContinentalExchange Inc., has been the venue for both of the high-profile direct listings so far, Spotify Technology SA and Slack Technologies Inc.

While companies planning direct listings don’t hire banks in traditional underwriting roles, Asana is working with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG and Jefferies Financial Group Inc. as financial advisers.