Linear

Today's product and engineering teams are often dealing with lethargic, fatally confusing tools more often than not. In a world that largely places value on speed and design, the need for some combination of speed, minimalism, and collaborative software development tools among high-growth software teams is rapidly accelerating. 

Karri Saarinen, Linear CEO, offers a new way for software teams to work by providing a very elegant and exceptionally fast issue tracking/tool management tool that builds upon a developer's flow. The firm  is designed as a product manager for a developer to be able to work throughout their week, freeing people from legacy platforms like Jira and provide a product that is designed for speed and clarity. Whether it is working on managing sprints, structuring product roadmaps, or bug triaging, the firm comes with a lightweight interface and command bar aimed to create a collaborative environment within software teams. Linear understands what developers need through its founders' experience with Airbnb and Coinbase. As a result, the company is poised to explode on the scene product wise among startups and fast-moving technology companies' needs for speed and minimalism. The AI-like features provide a summary of tasks, push updates back to the project manager, and keep everyone moving. Linear would like to be the default development operating system for software teams and strive for speed, design and simplicity. The firm allows teams to operate more contextually, with less distraction and keep getting things done.

What differentiates Linear most is its obsessive attention to design and user experience. Every interaction in the product—from how you create issues to how you share updates—is optimized for speed and flow. When you use their services, you're using "cycles" for sprint planning, "projects" to track a roadmap, and "views" to give you a zoomed-in or zoomed-out perspective on how teams are progressing. And not only do I love the keyboard-first navigation model, along with all of their version control integration, and GitHub/GitLab sync. Linear is built to not be in your way, in order to help your productivity. In 2024, they began experimenting with powerful AI agents to summarize your status updates, generate tasks based on team conversations and provide intelligent insights on team performance. With their approach to project management they are a lightning bolt that can thrive by incorporating only the most needed feature set, in contrast to overkill bloated tools. Their fast, and modern interface absolutely attracts startups developing AI and software. Their new premium features are packaged under "Linear Enterprise" to include deeper analytics, SAML/SSO, enhanced permissions. As teams are growing, this might be the most flexible and scalable solution.

Linear has experienced rapid growth, with more than 15,000 active teams using our platform. As a SaaS product, the firm implements a freemium subscription service to obtain revenue from teams who want additional features. To pay for additional features, teams could purchase paid plans starting as low as $10 per user, per month. By early 2024 the company was generating $20 million in annual recurring revenue “ARR” largely by teams realizing they preferred to employ Linear in place of tools similar to theirs that often provided tensions, overhead, and barriers. The company has enjoyed ARR from high-growth software startups and product teams with mature software products also adopting their services at a steady rate. The firm also achieved profitability during 2024. Notably, in addition to our continuing to grow revenue by over 200% year on year, we enjoyed positive cash flows from our ARR too through mid-2025. Linear had a lean operational structure distinguishing it from larger and less profitable competitors while we were able to scale a remote-first workforce as standard practice. The company has raised many rounds of financing, recently closing a $35 million Series B funded by Sequoia Capital in 2023; Linear closed an $82 million Series C mid-2025, led by Accel, and led along with Index Venture and included Sari Azout and Lenny Rachitsky. The company has more than $120 million total in funding, and the firm has achieved unicorn status with a now recognized valuation of $1.25 billion. In addition to the financial growth, Linear has experienced remarkable growth in its team and geography. As of mid-2025, the firm has grown to an ultra-lean but effective team of more than 80 employees. As a fully remote company, the firm’s team is spread across North America, Europe, and some parts of Asia. The company has no formal offices, but hubs have begun to form in various cities, including San Francisco, New York, Helsinki, and London, locations where groups of team members have the opportunity to occasionally meet in-person. This global, distributed model frees Linear to hire and onboard talent wherever it can be found while maintaining a high bar for the quality of design and engineering that the company wants to achieve. The firm is continuing to grow responsibly while working to maintain its culture of craftsmanship and product-first focus by being more prudent in hiring.

While Linear has become a clear leader, there still remains competition in the project management and issue tracking category. Atlassian's Jira has a massive portion of the market share, although it's been criticized for being bloated and mass-market in utility for nearly two decades. Shortcut fills a modern gap in this space and Height is establishing itself as a customizable product platform for product teams. ClickUp and Asana also loosely compete with product offerings in adjacent spaces with broader and exaggerated productivity features/non-features. Still, the firm has the luxury of being for developers and product managers and can develop a product that is capable of running faster and cleaner, with obsessive design attention to detail. Competitors will always rely on long lists of features or enterprise bundles, Linear will always win on workflow clarity, elegance, and performance. As a developer organization, the company has better and established positioning among teams that want to go fast and not lose structure.

Linear’s vision is bold and ambitious. It plans to continue to scale into large enterprise teams with the same philosophy about products. As companies scale AI infrastructure and product-led growth is accelerating, the company has plans to launch predictive planning, AI-generated backlogs, integrations with analytics dashboards, and also integrations with tools like Slack, Notion, and Figma to allow for better communication across teams.

According to CEO Karri Saarinen, the company is clear with its mission: “We’re building the tools we wished we had when we were working at big companies - fast, beautiful, and invisible when you don’t need them.” With its philosophy of flow, speed, developer experience, the firm is positioned well to lead the next step in software collaboration. As Linear scales - the very implications that teams have from project management tools is being rewritten. With a loyal customer base, healthy funding, the best talent in the world, and focus on design and speed - Linear's rise has only just begun.

Click here to access Linear's website.