Asana has told investors nothing about its business since late May, and will say nothing more until 3 September. Its shares have risen nearly 30% in a month anyway. Over the same stretch monday.com, which did report, published record enterprise growth and a beat on both revenue and earnings — and fell 9.4% in the three sessions afterwards.

Both sell cloud software for coordinating work: Asana a project-and-goals platform used by marketing, operations and engineering teams, monday.com a configurable "Work OS" from which customers assemble their own project, sales and support applications. Both are priced per seat, which is why both spent the past year being sold as the software most exposed to AI agents doing the work a seat used to do. Asana is down 30% over twelve months; monday.com is 58% below its 52-week high.

What actually moved them

Roughly two-thirds of each stock's monthly gain landed in the last week of July, when Asana jumped from $6.88 to $8.19 and monday.com from $73.91 to $87.09. Neither company published anything. What changed was the argument: Jensen Huang told investors that companies "will rent agents that use those tools, which means the software industry in the future will be much larger than the software industry of today" — a direct inversion of the seat-destruction thesis. The second burst came on 13 August, when Silver Lake was reported in talks to acquire Workday for about $51bn, putting a private-equity floor under de-rated software multiples.

This was not a bond-market bid. The 10-year Treasury yield sat near 4.7% on 20 August, within a few basis points of a 20-month high. Rates rose while the shares did. And the rally was broad: thirteen comparable seat-priced software names ran from 8% at BILL to 93% at Atlassian, leaving Asana's 29.5% and monday.com's 25.4% squarely mid-pack.

Only one of the two has the numbers

Asana's April-quarter revenue was $205.1m, up 9.5%, the fourth straight quarter in the nine-percent range against 19.2% two fiscal years ago. Gross profit grew just 6.9%, because gross margin fell 211 basis points to 87.6% as inference costs landed in cost of revenue. Dollar-based net retention was 96% — and also 96% among customers spending $100,000 or more, of which there were 817, up 12%. Management guided fiscal 2027 to $855.5m–$863.5m, growth of 8.2% to 9.2%. Its AI Studio product is disclosed as 17% of net new annual recurring revenue, a bookings-mix share rather than a reported dollar line. Adjusted free cash flow was $84.5m last fiscal year against stock compensation guided to the low 20s as a percentage of revenue — roughly twice the cash generated — and the diluted share count still grew 1.4%.

monday.com's June quarter grew 21.9% to $364.6m, with a 17% non-GAAP operating margin and annual recurring revenue past $1.5bn. Customers above $100,000 of ARR reached 2,019, up 37%, and those above $500,000 reached 114, up 68%. AI revenue doubled sequentially to 17% of net new ARR on a seat-plus-credit model launched in May. The blemishes are real: net retention of 109% was the lowest the company has ever reported, guided toward 108%, third-quarter growth was set at 16–17%, and 20% of staff were cut on 22 July. But retention among customers above $100,000 was 115%, the diluted share count shrank 16.6% year on year, and free cash flow yield is 7.8% against Asana's 4.9%. The $870m buyback authorisation is now fully spent, removing a bid that supported the shares through the fall.

The price of the same dollar

Because Asana loses money, earnings multiples are useless; gross profit is the honest denominator, and it tells a clean story. Asana's price per dollar of trailing gross profit was 2.14x on 3 May and 2.72x on 29 July. It is 3.18x today — a 49% re-rating in fifteen weeks with no new financial disclosure in between. monday.com's went 3.15x, 3.18x, 3.16x: its share price rose about as fast as its gross profit grew and its share count shrank. On forward earnings the gap is starker still — Asana at 25.7x against monday.com at 16.6x. Atlassian, the profitable comparator on the same rung, grew 27.6% last quarter and commands 8.07x trailing gross profit, more than double either.

The technical picture confirms the asymmetry rather than the fundamentals. Asana's 50-day average crossed above its 200-day on 7 August and its uptrend strengthened on 14 August; monday.com only turned upward on 12 August and has stayed there more tentatively. The likeliest mechanism is mechanical: short interest in Asana ran near 38.8% of shares in mid-August, and the move has been described as a short-covering rebound. Analysts model Asana's revenue at $929m in fiscal 2028, up 7.9% — the Street is not underwriting a re-acceleration.

The setup

Where it stands — Asana's multiple has re-rated 49% since early May on no disclosure; monday.com's is unchanged while its gross profit grew 20%. Would confirm — Asana's 3 September quarter showing net retention at or above 100% and revenue growth above 10%. Would invalidate — Retention holding at 96% with fiscal 2027 guidance unchanged at 8–9% growth. Watch next — Asana reports second-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Thursday 3 September; monday.com's third quarter guides to 16–17% growth. Valuation — Asana 3.18x trailing and 2.99x forward gross profit versus 2.14x in May; monday.com 3.16x and 2.94x, flat since May.