Linear (project management software)

Linear was founded in 2019 by co-founders Karri Saarinen (CEO), Tuomas Artman (CTO) and Jori Lallo (CPO). The founders said the idea grew out of their frustration with existing tools while designing and building software at companies such as UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry, Airbnb and Coinbase; the company shared its vision publicly in April 2019.⁠[1][2]

On November 21, 2019 Linear announced a $4.2 million seed round led by Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry (Stephanie ZhanStephanie ZhanStephanie Zhan is an early-stage investing partner at Sequoia Capital who focuses on artificial intelligence, developer tools, and related technology companies. She graduated from Stanford University in computer science, joined Sequoia in 2015, took part in early investments in companies including Linear, Middesk, Rec Room, and Tavus, and serves on the boards of companies including Linear, Reflection, Ricursive Intelligence, and Skild.Open the full entry) with participation from Index VenturesIndex VenturesIndex Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1996. It invests from seed through growth and operates across London, San Francisco and New York, supporting technology companies through a transatlantic network.Open the full entry (Sarah Cannon); angel investors included Figma CEO Dylan Field, Coinbase COO Emilie ChoiEmilie ChoiEmilie Choi is an American business executive and the President and Chief Operating Officer of Coinbase. She joined Coinbase in March 2018, became COO in June 2019 and also became President in November 2020. Previously, she spent more than eight years as LinkedIn’s Vice President and Head of Corporate Development, leading acquisitions including Lynda and SlideShare, and served on the boards of Okta, ZipRecruiter and Naspers.Open the full entry, Charlie Cheever and Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer. Hundreds of companies were using Linear daily, thousands had joined its waitlist, and the team worked remotely.⁠[2]

Linear launched after about a year in private beta, and almost all of its roughly 100 beta users converted to paying customers; it introduced pricing plans in the summer of 2020 and became profitable twelve months after launch.⁠[3][4]

On December 8, 2020 Linear announced a $13 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with Stephanie Zhan joining its board; former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, former Twitter COO Adam Bain, Stripe CEO Patrick CollisonPatrick CollisonPatrick Collison is an entrepreneur who grew up in Ireland. In 2010 he cofounded the payments and financial infrastructure company Stripe with his brother John Collison and serves as its chief executive; he is also a cofounder of the biomedical research organization Arc Institute and has been a director of Meta since 2025.Open the full entry, Lenny Rachitsky, Harry Stebbings and Aston Motes invested individually. The round brought Linear’s total funding to $17.2 million, and its fully remote team was spread across North America and Europe.⁠[4]

On September 14, 2023 Linear announced a $35 million Series B led by Miles Clements of Accel, with participation from Stephanie Zhan of Sequoia and Dick Costolo of 01Advisors; investors also included SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry’s Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, Claire Hughes Johnson, and leaders of customer companies such as Guillermo Rauch of Vercel and Ilkka Paananen of Supercell.⁠[5]

Linear said it had been growing and operating profitably since 2021 and had a negative lifetime burn rate, holding more cash in the bank than it had raised from investors; companies building with Linear then included Cash App, Supercell, The Browser Company, Retool, VercelVercelVercel is a cloud application development and deployment company founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT. It contributes to the open-source React framework Next.js and provides application hosting, deployment and runtime services; its products later expanded to AI SDK, v0 and infrastructure for AI applications. The company adopted its current name in 2020 and raised a $300 million Series F in 2025.Open the full entry, Cohere, Substack, MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry, Runway and Ramp.⁠[5]

In February 2025 Saarinen described Linear’s approach in an essay: the company hired its first employee after six months and roughly doubled the team each year. He wrote: “Profitability isn’t unambitious; it’s controlling your own destiny.”⁠[3]

On June 10, 2025 Linear announced an $82 million Series C at a $1.25 billion valuation, including both primary and secondary funding, led by AccelAccelAccel is a venture capital firm co-founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. It invests through regional teams and early-stage, growth and late-stage funds, with operations in the United States, Europe, Israel and India. Its investment history includes Facebook, Flipkart, Atlassian, Slack and other technology businesses. Fundraising totals, regulatory assets under management and portfolio-company transaction values are distinct measures.Open the full entry with continued support from Sequoia and 01A and new partners including Seven Seven Six, Designer Fund, Indie.vc and TK Ventures. Saarinen said Linear had been built without running a single A/B test and without SEO or growth hacks, and that more than 15,000 companies used it, including OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, Cash App, Ramp, Scale AI and Boom.⁠[6]

Linear’s legal name is Linear Orbit, Inc.; the company said its profit grew 280% in 2024 without disclosing an absolute figure.⁠[7]

As part of the Series C, Linear completed its first tender offer, letting current and former employees sell part of their vested options at the same $1.25 billion valuation offered to investors. It also described an employee program called Linear Infinity, which includes a 10-year option exercise window, a fully paid month off after four years and another every two years after that, and equity refreshers.⁠[8]

In August 2026 Linear described how it built Linear Agent, its built-in AI agent: rather than scripting a fixed path, the company set the agent’s boundaries through its system prompt, the design of its tools, its model of Linear, the scope of each run and a custom harness, and the agent works in surfaces such as Slack and Linear’s Loops.⁠[9]

On October 13, 2026 CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry announced that its Origin platform integrated more than 20 developer-tool apps, naming Linear among its partners and listing it as the marketplace’s project management app.⁠[10]

As of November 2026 Linear says more than 50,000 companies, including OpenAI, Coinbase and Ramp, use it to plan, build and ship products; it positions the product as a system in which teams and AI agents work together in a shared, structured environment, and its team is distributed across North America and Europe.⁠[1]

Linear’s platform includes sprint planning through “Cycles,” structured long-term initiatives, a Triage feature for routing and delegating incoming issues and feature requests, and analytics, and integrates with services such as GitHub, GitLab, Slack and Figma; it can be used in place of traditional project tools such as Atlassian’s Jira.⁠[7]

Linear: Official website: https://linear.app/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/linear (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@linear (opens in a new window).⁠[1]