Asana's Direct Listing IPO: What Investors Need To Know

Work management company Asana will hit the public markets Wednesday.

The Offering: Asana Inc ASAN will offer 30,030,516 shares in a direct listing. Pricing of the shares will be determined by investor demand prior to going public. NYSE said the reference price for the offering is $21, according to Reuters, although this is not an offering price.

Slack Technologies WORK also went public via a direct listing and is now worth $15 billion.

About Asana: Asana was co-founded by several Facebook FB leaders who saw coordination challenges that came as Facebook grew. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard, is an Asana co-founder.

“Asana helps teams orchestrate their work so they can achieve their missions faster,” reads the filing.

Surveys show that tasks like answering email, gathering info, and internal communication are productivity wasters and Asana is targeting that market. Its software helps with time management, task delegation and team project management.

Asana has 3.5 million free users and 1.4 million paid users from 82,000 paying customers (companies). The company’s free to paid conversion rate was 4.7% in July. Subscriptions are offered in basic, premium, business and enterprise tiers.

Market Size: The work management market is expected to grow from $23 billion to $32 billion by 2023.

Asana believes there are 1.25 billion global information workers and that it has less than 3% market share for the segment.

Over 27 million users have registered for Asana since its inception, which the company believes shows potential paying customers in the future.

Financials: Asana saw revenue grow 86% in its last full fiscal year, which was an 86% year-over-year increase.

Revenue for the first six months of the current fiscal year increased 63% year-over-year to $99.7 million.

The company reported a net loss of $118.6 million for the last full fiscal year. A net loss of $76.9 million was listed for the first six months of the current fiscal year.

Growth Plans: Asana lists growth objectives in its IPO filing as adding more customers, expand within its existing customer base, contribute to innovation, keep building its brand, developing functional workflows and developing organization-wide use cases.