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 (NASDAQ:TEAM)’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.