Workplace management company Asana has lost roughly half of its market value since the AI boom began. Now, it’s trying to find its way back by betting on a future where AI agents are fully immersed in the workplace.
On Thursday, Asana announced that it had acquired Stack AI, a no-code AI agent builder, for $75 million—its first acquisition in 18 years—timed to land alongside a first-quarter earnings beat that sent the company’s shares up more than 13%.
The acquisition is aimed at repositioning Asana as a platform for managing AI agents alongside human workers, at a moment when the company’s core business model is under intense pressure to adapt for the AI age. Asana has fallen victim to deep market anxiety regarding the future of seat-based SaaS models in an era of agentic AI. AI can increasingly do the work that the SaaS product itself was built to do, sparking investor concerns about the future need of such services. Companies like Asana have also historically grown by charging per employee seat, where more headcount meant more revenue. AI agents, which can handle work that previously required multiple human users, upend that business model.
Fears around a potential SaaSpocalypse erased more than $1 trillion in SaaS market capitalization in February alone, as investors began pricing in a structural contraction across the sector. Over a tumultuous year, Asana’s stock has fallen from $19 at its 52-week high to a low of $5.38. Thursday’s deal was partly meant to answer the question of what Asana actually is in a world where AI does a lot of what work-management software was built for.
