Linear was founded in 2019 by Karri Saarinen (former Airbnb design lead) and Tuomas Artman (former Uber engineering lead) in San Francisco. The company raised $52 million in funding, including a $35 million Series B in 2022, and has become the tool of choice for high-growth engineering teams.
Linear’s pitch is straightforward: issue tracking that’s fast, beautiful, and opinionated. Where tools like Jira offer maximum configurability (and often maximum complexity), Linear takes the opposite approach — it provides a streamlined workflow with sensible defaults for how software teams should manage issues, sprints, and roadmaps. The app is blazingly fast, with keyboard shortcuts for nearly everything.
The product has been adopted by thousands of companies, including Vercel, Ramp, Loom, and many Y Combinator startups. It’s become something of a status symbol in the startup world — when a company says they use Linear, it signals a certain engineering culture.
Linear offers cycles (sprints), projects (larger initiatives), roadmaps, and triage workflows. Git integration is tight, with automatic issue status updates based on pull request activity. The design philosophy extends to their own practices — Linear is known for building in public, sharing thoughtful blog posts about product design and company building. While it’s not trying to be everything for everyone (it’s deliberately focused on product and engineering teams), for its target audience, Linear has set a new standard for what project management software should feel like.
