BREAKING● Asana acquires StackAI for $75M ●MIT PhD builds AI agents the enterprise actually uses ●YC W23 to exit in under three years ●Kimera author trades robot eyes for office workflows ●"Specialized agents act" BREAKING● Asana acquires StackAI for $75M ●MIT PhD builds AI agents the enterprise actually uses ●YC W23 to exit in under three years ●Kimera author trades robot eyes for office workflows ●"Specialized agents act"

Founder / Engineer / Scientist

Tony
Rosinol

He taught robots to see the world. Then he built the platform that lets a company's software act in it.

CO-FOUNDER & CEO, STACKAI // ACQUIRED BY ASANA, 2026

Antoni "Tony" Rosinol. The smile of a man whose company just got bought.

The Dispatch

A platform for agents that do the work, not just talk about it

In May 2026, Asana paid $75 million for a company that did not exist three years earlier. StackAI began in 2023 as two MIT PhDs in a Y Combinator batch and ended as the cross-system engine inside what Asana now calls the operating system for human-agent teams. The man steering it was Tony Rosinol - on his birth certificate, Antoni - a computer-vision researcher who had spent his twenties teaching machines to map physical reality and then decided the more interesting map was the one inside a company's software.

StackAI is a no-code platform. A compliance officer, an IT lead, or a sales operations manager can drag together an AI agent the way a producer drags beats in Ableton, then point it at the systems where business actually runs - Salesforce, Slack, Google Workspace, the ERP, the help desk. The agent reads the data, follows the rules, and acts. RFP responses, due-diligence research, document extraction, IT tickets: the unglamorous machinery of a large organization, automated by people who never write a line of code.

Rosinol's pitch was never about chatbots. It was about specialization. General-purpose assistants are impressive at dinner parties and useless at month-end close. His bet was that enterprises would pay for agents that go narrow and deep, with governance and audit trails attached. The $75 million check suggests he read the room correctly.

Origin

From Barcelona to a robot that could see

Rosinol's path runs through the polytechnic university in Barcelona, a master's at ETH Zurich, and a PhD at MIT under Luca Carlone. His research question sounds almost philosophical: can a machine perceive a room the way a person does - not as a cloud of points, but as objects, surfaces, and things that move?

His answer was Kimera, a real-time system that fuses a camera and an inertial sensor into a living 3D map, complete with semantic labels and a sense of what is moving. The work earned an IEEE best-paper honorable mention and racked up hundreds of citations. It is still used in robotics labs today. Kimera is named to evoke the chimera - a single creature stitched from several - because it stitched geometry, meaning, and motion into one pipeline.

The throughline: build real things

Before StackAI, Rosinol co-founded Velohub and Blinkers, ventures in smart cycling and mobility, and logged time at GoPro and at high-stakes robotics work. The pattern is consistent: not papers for their own sake, but systems that ship. A founder profile summed up his reputation in five words - "relentless curiosity and a no-bullshit attitude."

Research, by the numbers

Citations792

h-index6

Years to MIT PhD2018-2022

The Timeline

Nine years, one straight line

2018

ETH Zurich. Master's thesis on visual-inertial odometry - teaching a moving camera to know where it is.

2018-22

MIT. PhD research on SLAM and 3D dynamic scene graphs. Builds and open-sources Kimera.

2019

IEEE RAL. Best Paper Award honorable mention.

2022

Rafael del Pino Scholarship. The Spanish foundation backs his leap.

2023

StackAI. Co-founds the company with fellow MIT PhD Bernard Aceituno. Joins Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch.

2025

$16M Series A. Backed by Gradient, Lobby VC, LifeX Ventures, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.

2026

The exit. Asana acquires StackAI for $75M. Founders join to build the operating system for human-agent teams.

The Deal

Why Asana wrote the check

Asana spent 2025 and 2026 rebranding itself from a task-tracker into "the operating system for human-agent teams." That phrase needs a teammate that can reach across a company's tools and execute. StackAI was already that teammate, just without Asana's distribution.

Rosinol framed the marriage plainly: StackAI brings the cross-system workflow engine; Asana brings a company's entire business context, memory, team workflows, and governance - plus an enterprise sales motion and thousands of customers waiting. The deal was announced after market close on May 28, 2026, timed to Asana's quarterly earnings call. Asana CEO Dan Rogers called it an accelerant into "the next phase of human-agent work."

For a company that raised less than $20 million, a $75 million outcome is the kind of math founders dream about and rarely get. Lean team, real product, regulated-industry customers, clean exit.

In His Words

The conviction behind the company

StackAI was built on a simple conviction: AI creates ROI for enterprises when agents can specialize and reach into the systems where business actually runs.

Joining Asana is the moment our offering scales. We bring the cross-system workflow engine; Asana brings a company's entire business context, memory, team workflows and governance.

Bringing us one step closer to AGI.

The Margins

Things that don't fit on a pitch deck

01His robotics system Kimera is named after the chimera - a single pipeline fusing geometry, semantics, and motion.

02He has both peer-reviewed robotics papers and a shipped no-code SaaS. Doing either well is hard. Doing both is rare.

03Before StackAI he co-founded Velohub and Blinkers in smart cycling, and spent time at GoPro.

04The StackAI homepage bio is four words long: "Bringing us one step closer to AGI."

05He shares the founding bench with Bernard Aceituno - also an MIT PhD, whose bio simply reads "AGI for the Enterprise."

06Spanish roots, MIT training, San Francisco zip code. The standard issue trajectory of a 2020s AI founder, executed unusually fast.