In May, it hired Cristina Cordova, a former leader at Stripe and Notion who was investing as a partner at VC firm First Round, to lead its fledgling go-to market efforts. Until this most recent funding, Linear had more than that $17 million raised in the bank, but hadn’t invested much in sales or support for its customers.
(By that time, with Linear a fully-distributed workforce, its founders had all left San Francisco - Saarinen for the San Diego area, Lallo for New York, and Artman back to Finland.) Just over a year later, Sequoia doubled down in leading a $13 million Series A that was joined by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and former Twitter executives Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, among others. Artman, whom they met in San Francisco’s small community of Finnish tech expats, previously worked as an engineering leader at Uber.Īfter announcing their project in April 2019, Linear’s early demand among test users was enough to raise a $4.2 million seed round led by Sequoia that November, with Index Ventures and a number of founders like Figma’s Dylan Field and Envoy’s Larry Gadea participating. Saarinen and Lallo took a previous startup through Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator before selling it to Coinbase, where both held early roles Saarinen later also worked as a design leader at Airbnb. Until this most recent funding, Linear had more than that $17 million raised in the bank.Īnother explanation for Linear’s early traction: the personal networks of its three Finland-born founders Saarinen, Jori Lallo and Tuomas Artman.
“Rather than having this chaotic process where things are flying in every direction, a pretty streamlined process.” “These kinds of systems require cooperation and coordination, and if people aren’t there, it doesn’t happen,” Saarinen said.
#REDACTED 35M SERIES TEN VENTURES SOFTWARE#
What makes Linear different - and why you’ll find it under the hood at so many fellow tech companies, from Sam Altman’s Worldcoin crypto project to publishing platform Substack and software development helper Retool - can be as simple as small features like better keyboard shortcuts that make engineers actually want to use it unprompted, Saarinen said. Atlassian’s Jira product has been around for more than two decades, with GitLab and others more recently releasing issue trackers on the project side, Asana and a host of others offer their own widely-used tools. Linear’s software is far from the first to offer tools for ticketing issues, managing roadmaps and development cycles.
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