Facebook Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz Raises $9 million For New Collaboration Startup, Asana

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile Jed Stremel.

Moskovitz, who was Facebook's first CTO, founded Asana with another former Facebook (and before that, Google) engineer, Justin Rosenstein. Matt Cohler, also a former Facebook executive who is now a partner at Benchmark, will be taking a seat on Asana's board. And two of its investors, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, currently sit on Facebook's board.

The company is keeping its enterprise collaboration product close to its vest. All Rosenstein will say is that it is time to replace "desktop-centric data models" with Web-based tools. "This is not social networking," he says. "These are productivity tools. We are re-imagining the problem from the ground up with with the Web in mind from day one." Today, people still primarily use email to collaborate. Asana wants to come up with something better.

Sounds like Google Wave or Yammer or something completely new but in the same vein. I asked Cohler why he invested. He was even more vague: "Huge market, totally new and compelling product." Thanks.

Asana is hiring. In fact, the new money will go primarily towards recruiting world-class engineers and product designers. Some of the perks, besides awesome investors and going after big markets, include:

In-house yoga. Every week we do yoga as a group, including +1s, with a private instructor. (Optional, but pretty awesome.)Organic homecooked meals twice a day.Three 30¿ monitors. Actually, we let you spend up to $10K on your setup, however you think best.