[pscarey]

It's easy to make a (poor) copy of the product. It's hard to execute the idea, take market share, and capture customer revenue.

Asana blogged this year about 50k organisations, 6 quarters accelerating growth [1].

Back in 2015 they blogged mentioning the heating up 'enterprise collaboration market'. There's countless office tools, diagramming tools, collaboration tools. Even in software there's more CI systems than I can count.

My guess is there's a big market which the VCs think is accessible to Asana in a way it's fundamentally not to a competitor. Combined with big growth it makes sense.

[1] https://blog.asana.com/2018/09/asana-company-updates-2018/

[nerdponx]

Taiga.io is a pretty good facsimile, but Taiga tries to incorporate too many of JIRA's Agile-related non-features rather than sticking to the basics. There is no good alternative (right now).