This month, only two companies from our portfolio reported earnings, CrowdStrike and Asana.

CrowdStrike’s earnings report was so solid that we couldn’t wait until month-end before writing about it. If you missed it earlier, please read it here. 

Asana

3 highlights

  • Revenue grew 59% YoY.
  • Customers spending $50,000 or more on an annualized basis in Q4 grew to 397, an increase of 92% year over year.
  • The dollar-basedDollar-based net retention rate for customers with $5,000 or more in annualized spend was 125%.

There’s a high likelihood you don’t know what business Asana is doing. Asana is a work management platform, it enables teams to organize work, from daily tasks to cross-functional strategic initiatives. With its products, Asana enables individuals to manage and prioritize across  each of the projects. Its products enable individuals to collaborate with teammates and have visibility into each team member’s responsibilities and progress. Think of it as a combination of Slack, Airtable, and Google Docs.

Asana enables executives to communicate company-wide goals, monitor status, and oversee work across projects to gain real-time insights into which initiatives are on track or at risk. Asana is powered by its multidimensional data model called the work graph. The work graph captures and associates units of work, the people responsible for executing those units of work, the processes in which work gets done, information about that work, and the relationships across and within the data.

Asana is a SaaS (Software as a Service) company and operates a B2B business model. In the fiscal year, 2021 revenues grew 59% year over year and its total paying customers count reached 93,000. It also recorded over 85% growth in revenues year over year from customers who spend $5,000 or more on an annualized basis.

Founded in 2008 by Dustin Moskovitz, ex-facebook co-founder, the company went public in October 2020 with a market capitalization of $4.1 billion. Today, the market capitalization is well above $4.5 billion, a 10% growth from IPO.

Its impressive full-year result has made it a subject of communication on social media already. A (well) former competitor also did a long thread on Twitter about how impressive the business has become.

In the fiscal year of 2021, revenues were $227.0 million, an increase of 59% year over year. GAAP operating loss was $175.6 million, or 77.3% of revenues, compared to GAAP operating loss of $119.6 million, or 83.9% of revenues, in fiscal 2020. Cash flows from operating activities were negative $92.9 million, compared to cash flows from operating activities of negative $40.1 million in fiscal 2020. Free cash flow was negative $76.0 million, compared to negative $44.6 million in fiscal 2020.

Asana falls under the category of a growth stock and the nature of such business is a sustained loss period until it reaches a critical inflexioninflection point. With unparalleled execution by the team and a clear vision about the strategic direction of the company, we believe that Asana’s potential will be realized as an addition to our portfolio.

Some other financial highlights:

  • Ended the year with over 93,000 paying customers and 1.5 million paid users.
  • Customers spending $5,000 or more on an annualized basis in Q4 grew to 10,174, an increase of 55% year over year.
  • Customers spending $50,000 or more on an annualized basis in Q4 grew to 397, an increase of 92% year over year.
  • The overallOverall dollar-based net retention rate in Q4 was over 115%.
  • The dollar-basedDollar-based net retention rate for customers with $5,000 or more in annualized spend was 125%.
  • The dollar-basedDollar-based net retention rate for customers with $50,000 or more in annualized spend was over 140%.

Non-financial highlights

  • Named #1 in the Workplace category in Fast Company’s prestigious annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2021.
  • Launched new product features, including Asana Goals; Project Overview and Brief; Asana for Operations, Sales and Account Management; and new integrations with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Jira, Salesforce, Tableau, and PowerBI.
  • Expanded the Asana Together community program to more than 2,000 members across 94 countries.
  • Topped the G2 Enterprise Grid® Leader quadrant for the third year in a row and earned the #1 spot in the 2021 Grid® Report for Project Management.
  • Ranked a Best Workplace by Fortune, Inc., Glassdoor and Built In NY – including the #1 Best Workplace in the Bay Area for the fourth consecutive year.

Financial Outlook

For the first quarter of fiscal 2022, Asana expects:

  • Revenues of $69.5 million to $70.5 million, representing year over year growth of 46% to 48%.
  • Non-GAAP operating loss of $44.0 million to $42.0 million.
  • Non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.27 to $0.26, assuming basic and diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 161 million.

For the fiscal year 2022, Asana expects revenues of $309.0 million to $314.0 million, representing year over year growth of 36% to 38%.

We remain fully invested in Asana and look forward to another full year report on how the company would perform.