The latest startup to join Silicon Valley’s unicorn club is San Francisco-based team productivity specialist Asana Inc., which today announced that it has raised $50 million from investors at a $1.5 billion valuation.

The late-stage, Series E funding comes less than a year after Asana’s $75 million Series D raise. This latest round saw London-based Generation Investment Management LLC return in the role of lead investor, with Benchmark Capital, Founders Fund and several other funds contributing as well. Asana has taken in a total of $210 million to date.

Asana provides a freemium project management service used by more than a million organizations worldwide. About 50,000 of those are paying customers, up from 35,000 at the time of the startup’s Series D round. Notable users include NASA, General Electric Co., AT&T Inc. and Google LLC.

Asana enables teams to organize outstanding tasks in a centralized visual dashboard to improve coordination among workers. Users can place items in a simple to-do list, a multicolumn workspace or, if a higher-level view is required, use a feature called Timeline that the startup introduced in March. It provides the ability to display related projects assigned to different teams in a chronically ordered view.

These collaboration features are paired with tools designed to help managers coordinate work activities and track progress. Asana co-founders Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz (pictured, left to right) have stated that they plan to expand the service’s scope further over time by adding machine learning into the mix. Moskovitz, who serves as the startup’s chief executive, was among the co-founders of Facebook Inc., while Rosenstein headed the social network’s engineering operations in its early days.

The funding from the newly announced round will go toward accelerating Asana’s growth plans. The startup is reportedly looking to grow its headcount from 400 today to 600 by the end of 2019, an expansion that is set to include the opening of new offices in Sydney and Tokyo.

Photo: Asana