Atlassian competitor Linear raises funding at $1.25-billion valuation
By Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Enterprise software maker Linear has raised an $82 million Series C funding round valuing the startup at $1.25 billion, the company said on Tuesday.
Venture capital fund Accel led the round, with participation from existing investors 01A and Sequoia, and new investors Seven Seven Six and Designer Fund.
Linear, a maker of software development and project planning tools, competes with Atlassian's project management tool Jira. Linear said its profits grew 280% last year, and it now has over 15,000 customers, including buzzy AI companies OpenAI, Scale AI and Perplexity.
The 80-person, remote-first company will use its funding to build more products and attract larger enterprises to its customer base, said CEO Karri Saarinen.
Linear focuses on specific product development use cases, a contrast to other tools that offer extensive customization but often overwhelm users, Saarinen said.
For example, the company has specific functionalities around common software development workflows, such as a built-in "triage inbox" for software bugs and feature requests, and management for software development cycles, called sprints. It also has functionality for managing an AI like a team member, enabling humans and AIs to build software together effectively, something that is becoming common, Saarinen said.
The company's commitment to customer-first product development over a technology-first approach is a focus that has been overlooked in the AI era, Linear investor Miles Clements, a partner at Accel, said.
"There are a lot of vendors that are pushing a lot of unwanted AI slop into the market, and the Linear team instead is clued into what users are looking for and then providing them something they want," he said.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San FranciscoEditing by Rod Nickel)
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