Deepening Our Commitment to Linear
Throughout our time working with Linear we’ve consistently observed the team’s commitment to first-principle thinking. Every design choice, every new hire, and every strategic decision is guided by disciplined root-cause reasoning and a patient approach to company building. Just as quality and craftsmanship shape Linear the product, this commitment to original thought has shaped Linear the company.
But “patient” does not mean slow: Linear is growing over 100% year-over-year and is accelerating, profitably, with over 15,000 customers and best-in-class efficiency metrics across the board. It organizes and accelerates the creative work for over 15,000 modern companies like OpenAI, Boom Supersonic, Cursor, Ramp, Microsoft AI, Brex, Scale AI, Vercel, and many other breakout enterprises across the growth economy. Today, we’re pleased to deepen our commitment to Linear with an $82 million investment valuing the company at $1.25 billion.
True to the Linear ethos, the company designed this round in its own distinctive way. It could have raised substantially more money, or also none at all. Linear hasn’t touched its Series A or B funds, and adds to its cash balance by operating profitably month over month. As Karri put it, “Being profitable doesn't mean you have to be anti-investors. It means you have that choice…you can raise more, less, or nothing. You can wait for the right timing, the right partner, or fund… Investors can still be helpful, and the additional cash balance can help you to make larger investments.”
The timing to make those larger investments has never been more enticing. This milestone is not a celebration of where Linear has been; it’s a statement of ambition to seize the opportunity ahead in an AI-native world. The explosion of coding agents and AI teammates requires an opinionated view of the future - a future likely shaped by these tools’ interactivity with one another and also their interplay with human engineers. As the system that engineers live in daily and the corpus of product teams’ intent, Linear is ideally situated to orchestrate this work.
Within two weeks of Linear introducing its Agents API, more than 3,000 companies connected agents through Linear to work alongside engineers. This rapid adoption of Linear AI tooling is inspiring but comes as little surprise, given the team’s purposeful approach and deep customer empathy. Rather than rush to fold in gratuitous features and unwanted AI widgets, Karri and team have patiently executed the product investments needed to underpin the behaviors their customers actually desire. Just as Linear’s signature speed and snappiness resulted from years of foundational engineering innovation, so too their AI workflows stand to benefit from thoughtful and principled implementation.
We’re pleased to deepen our support of Karri, Jori, Tuomas, and the talented Linear team as they continue to inspire and accelerate builders with quality and purpose.