Yet another goofy Silicon Valley name did not prevent Asana–the workplace productivity software start-up founded by former Facebookers Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein–from nabbing $9 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

The round, which was announced today, will be used to turbocharge Asana and its small team, who are aiming at the very dull and unexciting but very large and problematic workplace collaboration and communications software market.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga–so presumably, Moskovitz and Rosenstein are trying to help frustrated workers achieve a digital form of nirvana.

Former Facebooker Matt Cohler, now at Benchmark, will have a seat on the Asana board. Asana had previously raised just over $1 million in an angel round, which included a spate of Silicon Valley bigwigs.

In an interview today, Rosenstein said that solving the “friction of communications” in the workplace by innovating via “information transparency” was Asana’s goal.

But, said Rosenstein, “We are not taking existing tools and porting it over the to Web…but rethinking how people can productively work together.”

He added: “We want to change the way you manage information and how you keep everyone on the same page…there are tons of misses here everyday in the workplace and it is death by 1,000 cuts.”

Moskovitz said he was always trying to solve such issues at Facebook, the social networking site he co-founded and where he once was CTO.

Ticking off a variety of workplace collaboration tools he employed, including some newer Web-based ones such as Yammer, Moskovitz said, “We could not find any easy solution, because there is not any one that answers all your issues.”

The pair said they had working product that was being used internally at the company, but would not say when one would be released publicly.

Finding one would obviously be a magic bullet, said Benchmark’s Cohler.

“This is a really big existing problem that no one has solved,” he said.