Three ex-Airbnb and Uber engineers got so mad at Jira that they built their own project tracker. Linear loads in under 100 milliseconds, responds to keyboard shortcuts like a video game, and looks like it was designed by someone who actually cares about aesthetics. It spread through engineering teams like a virus — no sales team, no ads, just developers telling other developers. Jira has been the default for 20 years. Linear is the first tool that might actually kill it.
Founded
2019
HQ
San Francisco, California
Total Raised
$52 million
Founder
Karri Saarinen, Tuomas Artman, Jori Lallo
Status
Private (valued at $400M+ as of 2022)
Website
linear.appTHE ORIGIN STORY
Karri Saarinen (former Airbnb design lead), Tuomas Artman (former Uber engineering lead), and Jori Lallo (former Uber engineer) were frustrated with how slow and ugly existing project management tools were. They built Linear with an obsessive focus on speed, keyboard shortcuts, and design quality.
The product launched in 2019 and spread almost entirely through word-of-mouth among engineering teams. There was no sales team.
No advertising. Engineers tried it, loved it, and told their friends.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO
Linear is a project management and issue tracking tool for software teams. Think Jira, but fast, beautiful, and opinionated.
It charges per-seat SaaS pricing starting at $8/user/month. The product is designed for speed — keyboard-first navigation, sub-100ms interactions, and a design aesthetic that makes developers actually want to use it.
Linear has become the default project tracker at hundreds of startups and increasingly at larger companies abandoning Jira.
THE PRODUCTS
Linear Issues (project tracking), Linear Projects (project management), Linear Cycles (sprint planning), Linear Triage (bug intake), Linear Insights (analytics), Linear Asks (intake management)
HOW THEY GREW
Product-led growth. Linear does not have a traditional sales team — the product sells itself through developer advocacy and word-of-mouth.
Engineers use it at one company, love it, and bring it to their next job. Linear also publishes opinionated content about how to build software, positioning itself as a thought leader in developer tools.
The strategy is: be so good that switching costs feel worth it.
THE HARD PART
Competing with Atlassian. Jira has decades of enterprise relationships, thousands of integrations, and massive market share.
Linear's bet is that developer experience matters more than feature count — but convincing large enterprises to switch from an entrenched tool is a multi-year slog. Linear also needs to expand beyond engineering teams into product, design, and cross-functional workflows without losing the speed and simplicity that made it special.
MONEY TRAIL
Seed
2019 · Led by
$4M raised
Series A
2020 · Led by
$13M raised
Series B
2021 · Led by
$35M raised
WHO BACKED THEM
Accel, Sequoia Capital, 01 Advisors (Dick Costolo and Adam Bain)
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Head-to-Head
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