Jira walked so Linear could run like hell, and now they’ve raised $82M in Series C with a valuation clocking in at $1.25B. Welcome to the unicorn club, where speed isn’t a luxury, it’s table stakes.
Let’s start with the founders. Karri Saarinen, Tuomas Artman, and Jori Lallo didn’t just fall off the product design tree. These three engineered their way through Airbnb, Uber, and Coinbase, co-founding Kippt before “Y Combinator” was something VCs stitched into their pitch decks. Saarinen? Former Principal Designer at Airbnb and Coinbase’s founding designer. Artman? Scaled Uber’s mobile engineering from 15 to 400. Lallo? One of those rare engineers who codes with clarity and builds with soul. That’s not a founding team, that’s a tech trifecta.
Now Linear isn’t trying to be Jira with a makeover. It’s what happens when you treat UX like gospel, speed like currency, and product like a craft. Real-time, keyboard-first, zero-bloat issue tracking, cycle planning, and sprint workflows made for product teams that move faster than your compliance department can say “Let’s use Excel.”
So how does a team of 80 people spread across three continents become the answer to, “What would you switch to if your IT department got out of your way?” You ship with precision. You say no to bloated features. And you turn down marketing budgets bigger than your burn rate. Speaking of which, Linear’s lifetime burn rate is negative. Yes, you read that right. They’ve got more cash in the bank than they’ve ever raised. And they’ve spent just $35K on paid marketing. Ever. That’s not just efficient. That’s surgical.
Accel led the round, shoutout to Miles Clements, and returning champions Sequoia Capital and 01A are back on the cap table, joined by Seven Seven Six, Designer Fund, Indie.vc, TK Ventures, Soleio, Jeff Weinstein, Ilkka Paananen, and Lauren & Vlad Loktev. It’s not just a who’s who of tech investing, it’s a why-the-hell-didn’t-we-get-in-on-this moment.
Linear now serves over 15,000 customers, including the likes of OpenAI, Scale AI, Cash App, Supercell, Vercel, and Loom. They’ve been profitable since 2021 and just notched 280% profit growth last year. That’s not growth, that’s ignition.
Their next play? Scaling with intention, not bloat. They’re expanding their AI capabilities with “Linear AI” and “Linear for Agents” to make autonomous agents as natural as pair programming. And they’re coming for the enterprise, but on their own terms. No compromises, no slowdowns.
