Building our way (Linear raises Series C)

Today, I’m happy to share that we’ve raised an $82M Series C at a $1.25B valuation. The round includes both primary and secondary funding, led by Accel with continued support from Sequoia and 01A, and joined by new partners Seven Seven Six, Designer Fund, Indie.vc, TK Ventures, Soleio, Jeff Weinstein, Ilkka Paananen, and Lauren & Vlad Loktev.

I could write the usual post about how excited we are for what’s next — but I won’t. The truth is, not much changes after a raise. We go back to building. Same goals, just with more fuel and sharper focus to keep solving real problems for our customers.

Six years, our way⁠

I do want to take this opportunity to say that I’m proud of how far Linear has come. And how we’ve gotten here. For the last six years we’ve been able to build our way, with quality and purpose. We haven’t sacrificed what we care about.

I believe that building companies is a kind of craft. You’re creating something one of a kind. It’s shaped by a very specific group of people, in a very specific moment in time. You can never really replicate that or manufacture it again. And for most founders, it will be the only company you’ll ever build. That makes how you build just as important as what you build. Therefore, the way you craft should be important to you, and not just a means to an end.

Across the industry, there’s a tendency to pattern-match successful companies and rely on templates, playbooks and benchmarks. While it’s not completely wrong, trying to fit a mold often means missing out on truly unique opportunities.

I’m glad we’ve been able to resist fitting the mold. I’m glad we’ve resisted “best practices.”

We’ve built Linear without running a single A/B test and without chasing metrics or looking to data for answers. We didn’t do SEO and growth hacks. We’ve grown the team slowly and intentionally. Linear operates profitably and remotely. We built strong technical foundations before finding product-market fit.

We did this because our goal was to create quality experiences and the best product — not follow conventional practices. As a founder, your craft is to figure out how to make the most of your team, your strengths, the vision you have and the ways to get there. That doesn’t mean being stubborn. In the six years of building Linear, I’ve learned a lot and my thinking evolves constantly.

I’ve come to appreciate over time that saying no and setting constraints can help bring clarity. Whether in product, hiring or company operations, the constraints often reveal what’s really needed and bring out the right arguments and feedback. When you ask leaders to make a case for their hires, or when you ask deeper questions about why a customer needs a feature, you end up with something sharper.

And I’ve seen the response from teams using Linear every day and switching to it from other tools. Over 15,000 companies — including OpenAI, CashApp, Ramp, Scale AI, and Boom — choose Linear over legacy tools to move faster.

With this round, we’re marking our position as a company that is high growth, profitable and a standard for modern companies. But more importantly, we’re making a promise to our employees and every current and future customer:

We’re not going anywhere.

We’re going to keep building, and keep fighting for the way we believe software should be built.

The next shift⁠

So why raise this round now? I want to take a moment to talk about a generational change that is happening in how software is made. It’s a change in how teams work, how code gets written, how products get built.

Linear was built to be a generational company. It’s exciting to see this shift taking place. AI is changing the industry. We want to be the company that supplies the industry with the best possible workflows and tools for the new era.

It‘s hard to imagine a future where AI doesn’t play a major role, but like me, you are probably already tired of hearing about AI and its potential. The message is as widespread as it is thin.

Many AI launches today are announcing very broad tools that aim to address a large range of problems and use cases. While that shows the potential impact of AI, many teams still don’t know where to start or how to apply these tools to their workflows. There’s a gap between what these tools promise, and how teams actually use them. My gauge for what is hype and what is real is often measured by how close the person is to actually using the technology productively and realizing its value.

I’ve started to see a shift toward real AI productivity from our customers. They have been building AI features and agents that work with Linear. When you start to see this from your customer base, it means that people are truly motivated and adoption is happening. It’s no longer just a marketing message, actual use cases are taking shape.

Over the past few years, we've expanded Linear to support end-to-end workflows for building products, from customer discovery to planning to execution. Linear is unique because it actually manages all these workflows in a structured way and in a single product, bringing teams together.

We see this end-to-end workflow as the natural place to integrate AI and agents as purpose-built capabilities that serve teams, not just individuals. We’re focused on solving real, contextual problems within the workflow.

So this is all to say that AI is coming to Linear, but we are approaching it from the ground up, starting with real problems first. We are roughly aiming to do two things:

Linear for Agents⁠

We’re making Linear the place where agents can be deployed and managed to act across product workflows. Whether it’s a third-party agent, an internal agent you’ve built, or something we’ve made ourselves, the goal is for agents to live and work inside the same system as your team.

As teams start to run more agents across more workflows, coordination becomes important. It shouldn’t matter which agent you’re working with. Interacting with an agent should feel purpose-built, efficient, and integrated.

This will allow teams and individuals to utilize agents day to day and in parallel with their own work. Agents can solve annoying problems or maintenance tasks, low priority items or even hard broad problems, asynchronously. As Linear is a place to coordinate work across many builders, it will also be the place to coordinate work for agents.

Linear AI⁠

Because Linear already covers a wide range of product-building workflows, we are designing AI features that make those workflows more effective or automated. Helping teams create issues smarter, triage, categorize and route issues automatically, or summarize feedback and surface patterns that might have gone unseen.

These are not separate AI features. They’re built into the workflows themselves. Just like every other feature in Linear, they’re crafted with care, made to integrate seamlessly and designed to make you faster.

We’re continuing our mission to inspire and accelerate builders.

Thanks to all our employees, customers and investors.