Asana Inc., a productivity startup led by Facebook Inc. co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, late Tuesday announced that it has secured $75 million in fresh funding.

The round was led by Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management LLP. Other participants included 8VC, Founders Fund and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, with Dustin Moskovitz himself chipping in as well.

Asana revealed that the cash infusion comes at a time when its annual recurring revenues are growing at a rate of 80 percent. This revenue comes from the startup’s namesake team collaboration service, which is used by about 30,000 organizations including household names such as IBM Corp., General Electric Co., Airbnb Inc. and NASA.

For something so widely used, Asana has a surprisingly simple premise. It’s essentially a sophisticated to-do application that enables teams to organize the items on their agenda in a list for easy viewing.

A typical task on an Asana list includes a title, the time frame when the work is expected to complete and an indicator showing whether or not it has been signed off by a manager. Selecting an item brings up a detailed description of what needs to be done. Asana also provides several conveniences such as the ability to divide a list into sections and view team progress on a calendar.

A year ago, the startup added project boards into the mix that display to-do items as cards on a digital white board rather than in list. The move put Asana in direct competition with Trello, a fellow collaboration tool provider that was acquired a year ago by Atlassian Corp. Plc. for $425 million.

Asana’s new funding should enable it to step up the fight against the publicly traded company. The startup said that the capital will be used to develop new productivity capabilities for customers. According to Asana, users can expect this year’s first major feature announcement to arrive next month.

Asana has raised a total of $163 million in funding to date. Earlier investors that didn’t participate in the latest round include Mark Zuckerberg, Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark.

Image: Asana