Issue tracking and project management built for high-performance teams — now $1.25B
HQ: San Francisco, CA (remote-first) | Founded: 2019 | Employees: ~100 (2025) | Stage: Series C ($1.25B valuation) | Website: https://linear.app
Linear was founded in 2019 by Karri Saarinen (CEO, previously design lead at Airbnb and Coinbase), Jori Lallo (CTO, ex-Coinbase, Uber) and Tuomas Artman (ex-Coinbase, Unity). It is a purpose-built issue tracking and project management tool for modern product teams — an opinionated, fast alternative to Jira and Asana. The company is remote-first (SF/NY/EU) and famously profitable and product-led, with next-to-no marketing spend. CEO Karri Saarinen's 2025 letter 'Building our way' announced an $82M Series C at a $1.25B valuation with primary and secondary funding, emphasizing craft and independence over hypergrowth. Linear serves thousands of startups and scaleups including Stripe, OpenAI, Perplexity and Vercel.
Linear did what few B2B tools do: made issue tracking beloved. Founded 2019 by Karri Saarinen (ex-Airbnb design lead), Jori Lallo and Tuomas Artman, it won by pure craft — sub-100ms interactions, keyboard-driven, no bullshit. No outbound marketing, just word-of-mouth among Linear→Stripe→OpenAI-scale startups. Profitable by 2024-25, it raised an $82M Series C at $1.25B (Jun 2025) to stay private and opinionated, with $12.5M valuation per employee on 100 headcount. The bet: expand from issues to the product OS (Linear Product Intelligence, etc.) before Atlassian clones the polish — and its recent 'issue tracking is dead' signals an AI-native product development future.
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